Guide to Documentation and Building your Integration
TCA is the API for multiple Integrity products and not just 'iThenticate'. TCA provides flexibility to accommodate the requirements of all platforms, (and their use cases) looking to integrate with a specific product or subset of products. As such, the information and guides on this website detail functionality and options that 'may' be available or applicable to your integration use case.
An example is the 'Exposing TCA Settings and Functionality' guidance section. If you are a software vendor building an integration that will be used by multiple mutual customers, you need to expose a configuration page for the customer to enter their Turnitin URL and API key along with other settings. If you are building an integration that will only be used within your Institution then you decide what TCA attributes could be 'hard coded' and what need to be exposed to end users of your platform/product.
Architecture
The TCA service is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. The infrastructure is spread globally across multiple data centres. The European data centre is located in Frankfurt, Germany, the US data centre is located in California, and the Asia Pacific data centre is located in Sydney, Australia. Each ‘Tenant’ (Account) will be hosted within the data centre closest to its proximity.
The infrastructure is Multi-Tenant and each Tenant has it's own API URL. For example:
- https://customerA.turnitin.com/api
- https://customerB.turnitin.com/api
Submitted documents stay within the AWS region they were submitted to and are private to the Tenant that submitted them.
Differences (if migrating from iThenticate v1)
API
TCA is a RESTful API that uses JSON notation. It facilitates the ability to submit a file, generate and view a report via the following API steps:
- Create a submission, (pass meta-data) to obtain a Submission ID
- Upload a file to the submission
- Wait for submission processing to complete (using webhooks)
- Request a Similarity Report
- Wait for similarity report processing to complete (using webhooks)
- Request Report Viewer URL to display Similarity Report
Functional
No Login Required
The TCA uses an 'API key' sent in an HTTP header to authorize calls. The API key is created from within the administrator area for your tenant. Direction to guidance on how to do this will be included in your welcome email but is also available here.
No 'Folder based' Native Web Interface
Documents submitted via TCA are not visible in a folder structure of the products web-based user interface. Reports should be viewed by requesting a Report Viewer URL via TCA in the platform hosting the integration.
EULA Acceptance
Turnitin has a requirement that anyone submitting a document or viewing a report must first see and confirm they have seen the latest Turnitin End User License Agreement, (EULA) and the guide to implementation with the TCA is here.