General developer forum

Thanks for this it will help me to convert my own uploadusersandcourses.php script to Moodle 2. I feel it very strange that such an important function was not incorporated into core. Even Tim Hunt speaks for it in his post here.

P.S. for "new to php", then you have no chance unless you invest a lot of time. It is better to use scripts others have developed to a ready to use level. My own script is not at this stage yet. Depending on your needs you have to tune the code yourself, which can only be done, if you understand what my code does. I am used to comment every line to help you reed my code. So it is up to you and I can only answer the questions you may have.

Rosario

You are welcome. As I said the 1.9 version was in production since december 2011 in silent, full automated version. And I used it in the GUI-Version ever since I developed and published it here. Now the 2.3.1 Version is in production since september 14th, even if I say it is a BETA version here...

I will enhance it and clean up the code a little bit, but I want the code to be clear and understandable also for newbies, so that everyone can tailor to fit heir own needs. I think I will add some admin-config-options to facilitate using the GUI-version without having to set the variables in the code itself, to make it more ready-and-out-of-the-box.

But those who want to automate, must have a look into the code to avoid surprises.

Rosario

YES, you will find all the code you need to do so.

The actual logic is this way:

• read in csv file
• in first pass create courses that do not exist already
• if a course-template file is given in the file or a course to copy from, the same procedure is started for "new" and "copy" courseaction. The existing course is backed up on the fly and restored to get a copy of it which becomes the new course
• in the second pass users in the csv file are enrolled in those courses or in any other existing course
• to create the courses in certain categories you can either use a category-translation-table or deactivate the table and use course-category-IDs directly in the csv file

Rosario

Daniel, I am not sure whether I caught your idea/workflow:

>>The usual process is to restore content (or import) from the most recent iteration of the same course that has run previously

If your courses exist already, it would be enough to DEACTIVATE/HIDE and ACTIVATE/SHOW them to the Students. I think my code to read in your csv file with the simple course-short-names and one api-call to set the visible-flag to true/false would do the trick.

Another possibility would be to re-set the start-dates and/or enrolment-dates and/or enrolment-duration of the existing courses, so that access for the students would be automatically controlled by the dates you set. And with my script you would simply re-set those dates for the next term.

Finally, if you want to unenroll the previous students automatically and enroll the new ones still using my script, the best way to go is really using a backup/restore of the existing course without user data. But if you copy existing courses to new ones, of course, one day you will have to delete the old/original courses. So you have two new options here: either I finish implementing the deletion of existing courses in my script, as I had already scheduled to do, or I/you modify the script to fit your needs to unenroll previous students and enroll new ones. Even the latter should not be too difficult to implement.

Rosario