Storing interactive files outside Moodle?

Storing interactive files outside Moodle?

by Philippe Decloitre -
Number of replies: 1

Hello everyone,
I am just wondering, and perhaps Gordon _hi there_  could answer, why it is not possible for Moodle to work with SCORM or HotPot files that are not actually "within" the course page. Why can it not "import"/read the files off from a "distant" repository?

I'm asking this for 2 main reasons:

Backup/Restore and Update still do not work well at this stage, even with the latest Moodle stable. Just this morning I was updating an html JQuiz (just a typo). The activity (in the course) was an alias from "Private". I modifed the "Private" file (which did have the "chain" showing it was linked to that course). But the "old" file with the typo kept showing up when the activity was called for.

I had to delete the "alias" in the activity, then insert the new file, set it as "main" to have it show the corrected screen. That's all very well for one file, but what happens when you have tens, in several course?

If there was a way to have the tables of Taskchain look for exercises "outside" Moodle, that would be great _under the condition that Moodle would not have to "hardcopy" the file before using it, in which case, we would return square one, not always having the latest file showing up.

Cheers

 

 

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In reply to Philippe Decloitre

Re: Storing interactive files outside Moodle?

by Gordon Bateson -
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Hi Philippe,

in answer to your question, I would say that from a Moodle 2.x viewpoint, the most complete way to control access to content in any part of Moodle is to give each part of Moodle a "context", and then make sure only users who are allowed to can access and operate in that context.

As you may be aware, Moodle has a hierarchy of these "contexts":

  • Site -> Course category -> Course
    • Section -> Activity
    • Block

By enforcing access by context, we can be sure that materials are only available to people who it is supposed to be shown to. 

In the good old days of Moodle 1.9 we didn't have strict enforcement of this policy. However, the software was always evolving in that direction.

Now we are here in the brave new world of Moodle 2.x, and the changes in the file storage system are something we must adapt to. If files are not updated when they are supposed to be, we should find out why and fix it.

Maybe TaskChain should allow the use of external URLs to specify the source file, in the same way that QuizPort does. I have held off introducing this functionality, because it seemed to me that Moodle 2.x does not expect modules to do that.

QuizPort / TaskChain have their own file cache. At least in the case of QuizPort I can say confidently that is *does* detect when the remote file has been updated and recreate the local cache. The PHP code that dose this has been tried and tested and could be brought into TaskChain.

There are several other programming tasks in front of that though, so I suggest you first course of action is to report the problem with file content not being updated.

regards
Gordon

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