Manger's Email and Notifications

Manger's Email and Notifications

by Melissa Tommarello -
Number of replies: 21
I have come across something odd when trying to utilise the "Ask users for their manager's email address" and "Send notices to manager".
 
Here is what is happening:
 
When I leave "Approval Required" and all the "Send notice to manger" boxes on the activity unticked and then tick "Ask users for their manager's email address" in Home► Site administration ► Plugins ► Activity modules ► Face-to-face,  The 'Manager's Email' field on the session registration page appears, however, as expected no notifications get copied to the mananger becasue these are not ticked.
 
 
 
When I change this so that I tick either "Approval Required" or any of the "Send notice to manger" boxes and keep the "Ask users for their manager's email address" ticked, then the "Manger's email" field disappears and it says "You are currently not assigned to a manager in the system. Please contact the site administrator."
 
 

Has anyone else expereinced this problem?

Thanks

Melissa

(I am on Moodle 2.2.2)

 

 

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In reply to Melissa Tommarello

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Melissa,

Did you ever resolve this? 

I created the custom field  "managersemail" and filled it with a default value.  This new field now shows just under "location", "venue" and "room" when I create a new session.  The default value I set is there and it is modifiable.  

Despite this, as soon as I tick "approval required" for the activity the "You are currently not assigned to a manager in the system ..." warning appears when I try to sign up for a session

I'd love to know how to make this feature work.  Can anyone assist with this?

Jenna

   

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In reply to Jenna Pitcher

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jeremy Schweitzer -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Jenna,


The managersemail needs to be a user profile field and not a custom field within F2F. The manager's email then must be set in each profile. It's a great feature, but does take some setup to get working.


Just to make it clear, to create a custom profile field in Moodle 2.0+ go to Settings > Site administration > Users > Accounts > User profile fields. Use the dropdown box to create a new profile field and choose the text input option. Then set the short name to managersemail. The other options can be set to pretty much whatever you want.

We set the full name to "Supervisor's Email" because that's the langauge our users would understand, we made the field appear on the signup page and did not lock the field (those are the major setting options).

Hope this helps.

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In reply to Jeremy Schweitzer

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Melissa Tommarello -

Hi Jeremy

From my testing though, this does not work unless you also have the managersemail field already pre-populated in the user's profile field.  Is that correct or am I missing something?  That is the only way I have been able to get it to work.

Thanks

Melissa

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In reply to Melissa Tommarello

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jeremy Schweitzer -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Melissa,

That is correct, you have to fill out the field before the user will be able to register. We have it set as a required field during the signup process. 

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In reply to Jeremy Schweitzer

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Hi Jeremy,

Again thank you for the guidance.  This is an extremely valuable functionality for us, since as a training department supporting external customers, we (training and not their manager) need to approve registrations for most F2F sessions.

When I created the user profile field, I populated it with a default value (our Admin email address) and hid the field from users completely.  I was hoping that since the field had a default value when the user self registers, that this would be all that was necessary to make it work.

For some reason that does not turn on the functionality.  Using our approach, to get it to work after the user registers, our admin must then enter and resave the user profile.    

Jenna

  

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In reply to Jeremy Schweitzer

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Tiffany oakes -

I have 2.3 and don't see the User profile fields you mention in your post. When I go to Setting> Site administration> Users> Accounts, this is what I get:

accounts

How do I get to the User profile fields setting?

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In reply to Tiffany oakes

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Melissa Tommarello -

Not sure why you can't see it under 'Accounts' - Perhaps someone can knows?  However, as a work around can you access it if you go to the url directly. Try yoursitename/user/profile/index.php

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In reply to Melissa Tommarello

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Tiffany oakes -

Melissa,

That totally worked! Thanks. How do I get facetoface to pull the manager's email from this field to email the manager when the staff registers for an event?

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In reply to Tiffany oakes

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Next step is to enable manager's approval in the F2F activity.

Jenna

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In reply to Jenna Pitcher

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Melissa Tommarello -

Not exacly, but I have got a bit further.

I created a custom profile field  "managersemail" like you have done.  As you discovered once you click "approval required" or switch on any of the manager email notifications, then when you try to book a place you get the "You are currently not assigned to a manager in the system" message.  

However, when I did one of the following the funtionality worked:

  • Manually entered an email into the "mangersemail" address field in the users profile field

- OR -

  • Edited the custom "mangersemail" field by switching the "Display on signup page?" to Yes.  Then when users self-register onto the site they have to complete this field.

When you do one of the above.  You then get this:

The manger's email address that was manually entered by an adminstrator or entered by the user during the self-registration process then appears to have pre-populated the 'Manger's email' on the page above.  What does puzzle me about how this works though is that this field appears to be editable.  Yet, if you edit it the notifcaations are not redirected to the new email address.  So what it looks like is that you have to have the "managersemail" populated before you can use the manager approval of turn on the manager notifications.  What still doesn't not make sense to me though is why the 'Manager's email' field appears when you do not have any form of manager approval of manager notification switched on.  We are currnetly using self-registration on our site so this should mean that this funtionality will work if we have a custom "managersemail" field on our resigtation page.  What this doesn't easily solve is for all our users already in the system without manager's email in the profile.  In the near future we will be stepping away from self-registration though, so this will likely make it more difficult to capture the manager's email in the registation process.

Do let me know if you discover anything else I have missed or have any better ideas.

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In reply to Melissa Tommarello

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Jeremy,

Thank you for the clarification of the custom user profile field.  So after much trial an error I managed to get it working on our staging instance.

The problem is that I'm not entirely sure how I did this.  smile 

When I created the customer user profile field I prepopulated it with a default value. In our case we are just looking for a way to have an admin approve all registrations, so one email address for everyone will work.

I did leave the "request manager's email" unchecked in the F2F module settings and then played with changing the email address by editing the user profile field.  None of this worked until I deleted all the F2F activities on the site and started over.

I have tried to make it work on our production server which is going live in a few weeks with no success and am thinking I may have to wipe all the F2F activities I've set up. 

Jenna

 

 

 

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In reply to Melissa Tommarello

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Melissa,

""What still doesn't not make sense to me though is why the 'Manager's email' field appears when you do not have any form of manager approval of manager notification switched on."

This may just be a way of collecting/maintaining the managers email address and populating the user profile field after they have already registered on the site.

Jenna

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In reply to Jenna Pitcher

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Amir Elion -

HI All, I believe Alastair is not available for a while to answer these questions. I think some of the issues you mention are related to the fact that face to face module is used as a core module in Totara, where manager approval is an optional part of the process and where it is handled through the built in hierarchies of Totara. Amir

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In reply to Amir Elion

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Hi Amir,

In our case I recognize that we may be trying to use the Manager approval functioanlity in a slightly different way from which it may have been intended and am willing to "suffer a little" to get it to work.

The first difference is that our users are external to our organization and their registration requests need to be approved by our admin staff and not their manager/supervisor.  Because of this I populated the "managersemail" field with a default value, hid it from the user and left it off the registration page.   

When I test this with a new user I've found that I stiil get the same error re "missing managers email address ... consult your admin" until I go into the users profile as admin and "update profile".  I find this strange as the default value is there in the "managersemail" field when I look at the new profile.  So the users Moodle profile has the value but F2F is not recognizing it.

My work around may be to look at modifying the email-based self registration process to have the email sent to our admin who can then go into the profile, and click on "update profile" before notifying the user that their registration is now active.

I'd appreciate any feedback on this, specifically why the manager's email address show's in the users profile but is not recognized by Face to Face until the users profile is updated.

Jenna

     

 

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In reply to Jenna Pitcher

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Amir Elion -

Hi Jenna,

I am not sure I understand correctly what you did, but it seem to me that you are trying to addrress this via various admin settings and actions - such as adding a custom field, etc. However, what you're trying to achieve can only be addressed through code changes to the behaviour of the module. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

Where did you add the custom field to? The face to face session? The user profile? At any rate - the face to face module does not "know" it's supposed to take it from there, but it looks in a predefined field that holds the user's manager email or a reference to it (not sure about that as I am not a programmer myself...)

Sorry I cannot be of more help, but this seems like a change of behavior a programmer can help you with.

Amir

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In reply to Amir Elion

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jeremy Schweitzer -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Jenna,

You're on the right track, all you have to do is add the user profile field, but I've never tried to pre-populate one of those fields, there may be something about the process that isn't actually recording the data in the database until it's manually opened and saved.

Amir,

F2F predates Totara by several years - they've just inherited maintenance for the plugin and made it a core component of their custom spin of Moodle. 

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In reply to Jeremy Schweitzer

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Jeremy,

I did tried a few variations, exposing the prepopulated field to the user in the signup form for example and that made no difference unless it was overwritten by the user.  So I'm inclined to believe you are right about it not being comitted to the database until it's opened and saved manually.

That begs the question... "What is the point of having the ability to include a default vaue for the new custom profile field, if it is not saved to the user's profile.    Moodle bug?

Thanks,

Jenna

 

    

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In reply to Jenna Pitcher

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Melissa Tommarello -

Yes, I agree.  - It is not clear what the point of the default value is.  I was expereimenting with it and did not see what it's purpose was.  

I also am not sure why the Manger's email field on the registration page appears as an editable field for the user.  When you edit the email that by default appears (which is the one that is in the user's profile) it then does not send the message to the default email or the one you edited it to.  Does anyone know if there is a way of not making this field editable?

Thanks

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In reply to Melissa Tommarello

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Jenna Pitcher -

Melissa,

This is the process we will be implementing when we go live in one week.

1. Create the custom user profile field "managersemail" with the default email address of our Admin

2. Hide the new "managersemail" custom field completely from the user

3. Change the email-based self registration process, so that the user email with the link that takes the user back to moodle to confirm the registration, goes to our Admin and not the user registering.

4. Admin receives the email and then manually confirms the registration: 

5. Admin then edits the profile and without changing anything in the user profile clicks on "update profile".  This apparently commits the default value entered in the "managersemail" field to the database.

6. Admin sends welcome email to the user and were done. 

If you leave the email based self reg process as is, you will have to monitor your user account creation carefully and update the new user profiles in as timely a manner as possible. 

Jenna

 

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In reply to Jenna Pitcher

Re: Manger's Email and Notifications

by Melissa Tommarello -

Thanks for letting me know what your process is going to be - it is just helpful to understand how others are using it.  Our process will be quite different so I will post what are process is what we confirm what we will do.  

It is good to know about committing the default value entered in the managersemail field - that would explain why it was not working before.

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