Talk:Question Engine 2:Design

Some thoughts

Some ideas from reading this proposal:

1. question_states table store state as an Integer. However, some complex qtypes (like our planned training) may want to have custom sub-states (especially for Incomplete state). They can be stored in question_responses but that is somewhat inconsistent. What do you think about adding a field for substate in questions_states or making state field a float, so substates can be after comma while states before?
2. question_responses table structure is generic and can be used by many other modules (like assignment). I think that it will may be good to have a library of functions that work with such tables.

Also some ideas that may not be directly related to it:

1. I'm long dreaming about an ability to tag question categories (maybe quesitons too), and then filter them by that tags on various occasions (from listing and editing trought random questions to import/export). Tree hierarchy isn't sufficient. I have a category tree organizied by topic in the course, but then on the each topic I have one demo, several training and many control categories. And sometimes I need something to be done with all demo categories or something like that.
2. there are several questions (in core and not) - shortanswer, numerical, calculated - that shares a model of having several answers, with finding a matching one by some rules (multichoice partialy fits there in single choice mode). What do you think about abstracting it in abstract_multianswer qtype (oh, existing multianswer probably better to be known as multiquestion)? It isn't really good to place functions, that similar to all them, in root question type class.

Also I'm wondering, for questions with sub-states in Incomplete state, would it be easy to create a Replay on reviewing? This should be taken into consideration too IMHO. --Oleg Sychev 12:48, 3 October 2009 (UTC)