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Plan to Improve Flexibility of Question Category Sharing and Permissions

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Revision as of 01:18, 4 April 2007 by Jamie Pratt (talk | contribs) (additions to plans)

Status of this Plan

Working on the plan now and it is still under discussion. Please post comments here : forum discussion starting here with new heading 'Plan to Improve Flexibility of Question Category Sharing and Permissions'

Background

Commenting

I plan along the way before making changes to the question bank code to add plenty of commenting in the approved Moodle style and in line with this info on Quiz_developer_docs#Code_documentation. Will add ??? where I'm not sure of something and generally add as many inline and phpdoc comments to the code as seem useful. I think Moodle guideline suggest that there are never to many comments in code, I'll try to keep the comments succinct. This I hope along the way will be a good way for me to learn about how the code works myself and cement the concepts in my own mind.

Rest of Tasks in Plan Are In The Order I Intend to Tackle Them

Commenting will be something I'll do throughout my work as I delve into the code and add new code. The rest of tasks in my plan below are in roughly the order in which I intend to tackle them.

Before Branch Changes to HEAD, ?17_STABLE? AND 18_STABLE

Add an admin report as described here. I've left the description of this below so that it is context.

Before Branch Changes to HEAD

I propose to make these changes before I branch the question bank code to work on a development branch.

Convert the Current edit categories table to a UL

Will convert the current edit categories table to an UL. This will be one step towards the new interface with several headings and lists of categories below each context heading. I won't add the context headings at this stage just change the current table to a UL.

Remove the Question Bank Reliance on SESSION

Will work on removing the use of SESSION to keep track of what category should be displayed and pass category and other params from page to page as url params or as hidden fields for buttons.

After Branching

Make DB changes

Remove 'publish' field from question_categories table 'course' field will become 'contextid' and will be of INT type pointing to the 'context' table.

Calculate equivalent context

Contents of the new context table will depend on the old contents of 'publish' and 'course' if publish is 1 then we make the context the site context. If it is 0 then we make the context the context for the course indicated in the 'course' field.

Change in How Categories Are Shared

Previously you could share a category anywhere in your Course's question bank category hierarchy at the site level. Now we have decided that we'll have seperate hierarchies for categories at each context level. So we need code on db upgrade to check that all parent categories referred to in the question_categories 'parent' field are in the same context. If they are not then this category becomes a new top level category.

So if a question category hierarchy in a course is as below :

  • Default
    • Science
      • Physics (shared)
        • Momentum and Dynamics

The Physics course will get moved to the site context since it is shared and the question category hierarchies will then be as follows :

Course Level

  • Default
    • Science
      • Momentum and Dynamics

Site Level

  • Physics

If a childs parent is gone then it get's put in the grandparent category, if no grandparent, then grand grand parent etc. We'll search up the category hierarchy till we reach a category that is still in the same context level or we reach the top level and use that as a parent.

Random Questions Issue

Problem
The problem here is that if there was a random question in category Science or Physics which had the 'Display questions from sub-categories too' turned on, then before or after the upgrade, it will behave differently. I don't know what the best solution to this is.Tim Hunt 07:49, 21 March 2007 (CDT)
See discussion of this issue starting here.
Proposed Solution

We'll write an admin report (the 'Is your question bank ready for Moodle 1.9?' report) and check that in to the 1.8 (and 1.7?) stable branches. That report performs the same logic on your site as the upgrade would, and lists all the categories that would cause a problem if you upgraded now. This report can include lots of explanatory text, and have links to go and edit those categories manually, so people can easily tweak things by hand before upgrading if they want to. We can then point people to that report in the release notes.

The first steps in the db upgrade should proceed as follows :

  1. Delete all random questions in the question bank that are not included in a quiz before upgrade. This should be safe. These questions have somehow become orphans and shouldn't be in the question bank anyway.
  2. Then we work through all the category trees in the site, starting at the top, and every time we find a category with random questions picking from subcategories, we set all child categories to have the same published status as that one. We log the changes we make so they can be reviewed later and print a warning during the upgrade process.


Edit Categories Page

Add Headings to Edit Categories Page for Each Context Level

  • Will add headings to edit categories page and below each heading there will be a list of categories in that context. Edit Categories page will then have the structure as shown here
  • The contexts available depend on where you are editing the categories from. Thus in one course you only see that course's context, any parent course categories contexts and the site context. When in the site context you only see the site context.
  • Order of listed contexts is most specific to least specific. Questions only for this module, for this course, for Course Categories, for Site.


Add Up / Down Action Buttons

These will work as discussed here - I like the first option and not the alternative I discuss.

Question Bank Page

  • New Question Category selection box with contexts as OPTGROUPS. Something like below. Only available categories are shown ie. only the parent contexts of the current context to which the user has usequestions capability.
  • Make sure indentation of category hierarchy works properly.
  • Add count of questions in brackets after each category.
  • Order of listed contexts is most specific to least specific. Questions only for this module, for this course, for Course Categories, for Site.
Optgroup.gif

Question Adding / Editing Forms

  • New Question Category selection box with contexts as OPTGROUPS. Same as in Question bank page above.

Add code to cope with detecting and moving associated files

Need code to check for files in the current course / at the site level that need to be moved when a question is moved. Questions can be moved either :

  • when a whole category is moved in the Edit Category page
  • or when an individual question is moved in the edit question form by using the select box there.

We will check for linked course files and site files in question text and other text using a regular expression. List associated files for user and allow user the choice to move files to the same context as the question. So if a question is shared at the :

  • course level or module level associated files will be stored in the course files area.
  • course category or site level associated files will be stored in the site files area.

Add fields to question table - created, modified, createdby and modifiedby

Add fields to the question table to track who created and modified a question and when. Old questions will all have createdby / modifiedby set to 0 initially which will mean the creator / modifier is unknown.

Add Permissions to Roles and Permissions System

Will extend the capabilities of the permissions system to differentiate between a question that is owned by the editor and a question not owned by the editor. There is some debate as to how granular these permissions should be. In the plans mentioned in this discussion I mention differentiating also between a question created by someone in the same group as you compared to someone not, this won't be dealt with yet at this stage.

Modify Restore and Backup

Make sure restore and backup can deal with changes to questions. We should support newer type questions db backup restoration as well as supporting restore of older backups. Backup and restore permission

Restoring older category hierarchies

TBD

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