Enrolment

Comfy indeed. and will be using your code.

Thanks for posting it.

Peace

drs

Hi,

I'm in a similar situation, with a load of course names and descriptions held in a table on another mysql database. I originally started off with a similar approach to Eduardo, using only the built-in moodle functions, basically faking input to the $form object and running it through the remnants of course/edit.php. However this is very slow, and will probably timeout with a reasonable number of records.

I'm no php coder, but I knocked together a script that runs through all the records on one table and makes courses in moodle from them, useful for a direct transfer from an existing database, could easily be adapted for a text file or something. Most of the optimisation is through not using the moodle functions that use ADO and avoiding creating/destroying objects too much. Anyway its a lot faster, averaging about 100 records/sec on our really ancient server running IIS and PHP on debug mode! Hope this can be of use to somebody:

<?php
function microtime_float()
{
    // We don't have php5
    list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
    return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}

function fastcreatecourse($hcategory, $hfullname, $hshortname, $hsummary, $hweeks, $hday, $hmonth, $hyear, $hmtime, $hmaxsize = 2097152) {
    // prevents object pointers being continually created and destroyed, saving time in theory
    static $courseid;
    static $mysqlresource1;
    static $mysqlresource2;
    static $mysqlresource3;
   
    if ($mysqlresource1=mysql_query('SELECT `id` FROM `mdl_course` WHERE `ShortName`=\''.$hshortname.'\'')) { // Check shortname is unique before inserting
        if (mysql_num_rows($mysqlresource1)) {
            return false;
        }
    }

    $mysqlresource2=mysql_query('INSERT INTO `mdl_course` (`category`,`sortorder`,`fullname`,`shortname`,`summary`,`format`,`showgrades`,`newsitems`,`teacher`,`teachers`,`student`,`students`,`startdate`,`numsections`,`maxbytes`,`visible`,`groupmode`,`timecreated`,`timemodified`) VALUES (1, 2000, \''.$hfullname.'\', \''.$hshortname.'\', \''.$hsummary.'\', \'weeks\', 1, 5, \'Teacher\', \'Teachers\', \'Student\', \'Students\','.mktime(0,0,0,$hmonth,$hday,$hyear).','.$hweeks.','.$hmaxsize.',1,1,'.$hmtime.', '.$hmtime.');');
    $courseid=mysql_insert_id();
    $page = page_create_object(PAGE_COURSE_VIEW, $courseid);
    blocks_repopulate_page($page); // Setup blocks
    $mysqlresource3=mysql_query('INSERT INTO `mdl_course_sections` (`course`,`section`) VALUES (\''.$courseid.'\',\'0\');');
    return true;
}
    // Code execution begins here
   
    require_once("config.php"); // Link to moodle libs
    require_once("course/lib.php");
    require_once("$CFG->libdir/blocklib.php");
   
    $mtime=time(); // Initialize some variables
    $n=0;
    $t=0;
    $courseid=-1;
   
    $classes = get_records_sql("SELECT `ClassID`, `ShortName`, `Description` FROM `classrecords`"); // Query our other external database
   
    set_time_limit(300); // Up the php timeout
   
    $time_start = microtime_float(); // Just for timing
   
    foreach ($classes as $class) {    // Iterate through the external databases records
        if (fastcreatecourse(1,$class->ShortName,$class->ShortName,$class->Description,10,1,5,2005, $mtime)) $n++;
        $t++;
    }
   
    $time_end = microtime_float();
   
    echo '<h2>Processed '.$n.' records out of '.$t.'</h2>';
   
    fix_course_sortorder(); // Re-sort courses
   
    echo '<h2>Sorted courses</h2>';
   
    echo '<h2>Total execution time: '.($time_end - $time_start).' secs </h2>';
?>