General developer forum

> How would this work in a course? Eg if all files are loaded as resources in a
> course, would they show up in a topic/week?

Not if they were just files. To show up in a topic, an activity or a resource has to be a course module. There is a separate table for this. As a side effect, if a resource (or activity for that matter), exists in its own table but not in the course module table, it won't show up in the course page listings - but its still there with the proper course reference. This system would take advantage of that.

With images, if they are accessed via 'file.php' then this system would affect them. So, there would be at least one database access for each image (to get the resource record), so, that could be a bottleneck. But, if we change the way we do this, we could use index references instead of filename, so the database access could be on a primary key (which is supposed to be as fast as a file access, right?).

As for student files, if we get a standard way of accessing files that includes privilege checking, we could work on developing the rest.

I think a key thing here is to use a style similar to a unix directory access system. That way, looking at a directory of files requires just checking the directory access record. Access to a specific file would use the file's access.