Testing and QA

I will plan on doing a download and try out the new code with a fresh install of Moodle.

Let's say you have an external system where you already have all the oficial enrolment information for your students and teachers. Our university currently has one of these beasts, and its database stores the full list of courses taught at our Faculty, the full list of teachers and students in our Faculty, what students are oficially enrolled into which courses, which teachers teach which courses, etc.

Say you have a table in that database that has (at least) the following information:

       school_student_id, school_course_id

for each and every student that is enrolled into one or more courses, where school_ student_id is the way you identify a student in your academic management system, and much the same goes for school_course_id. For example, in our system, the fields that store these informations are called 'IDAL' (IDentificador de ALumno) which is a numerical id and 'IDASIG' (IDentificador de ASIGnatura), which is an alphanumeric id (like LD2005A).

If you somehow relate this school_student_id with a given Moodle user, and school_course_id with a given Moodle_course, then you can automatically enrol everyone into their courses.

Just the same for the teachers if you have a table that has at least:

    school_teacher_id, school_course_id

Of course, you need to relate school_student_id, school_teacher_id and school_course_id to something inside Moodle. Also, bear in mind the table for the teachers and the one for the students may not be the same (it's not in our system).

So you need to tell Moodle which are all the tables you need, and what names have the fields in those tables with the data you need to relate both worlds (Moodle and your external database).

Finally, it's possible (if you want to) autocreate non-existent courses when a student or teacher needs to be enrolled into it. Say you external tables have a tuple that says student '123456' has to be enrolled in course 'LD2005', but that course doesn't exist yet. If you have another external table where all of your courses are stored, with their full name, shortname and school_course_id (the same we used in the students/teachers tables), the plugin can autocreate the course in Moodle (empty or from a given course template) and enroll the student, all in the same go.

Now to the questions


Yes. You have to create one record for every course the student is enrolled into. Just the same for the teachers.


The course id is something (anything) you use to refer to one course. In our system, courses have a fullname (64 characters long, in Spanish and Basque), a shortname (15 characters long in Spanish and Basque again) and a short identifier (8 characters long) that we use as a key and that we call IDASIG. This is what the plugin calls the course id.

Then, when we create courses inside Moodle, we put this IDASIG value in the 'ID Number' field of Moodle courses (which is called 'idnumber' in the database). That way, we can relate both without much trouble.


You can use enrol_database_sync.php (from the command line!) to sync your external database with Moodle, or you can wait until students and teachers log in. Everytime users log in Moodle, Moodle updates their enrolled courses as part of the login process.


Right now, you can't. The plugin currently knows about "students" and "teachers". The rationale behind is that "editing teacher" and "hidden teacher" is something only Moodle knows about. Your normal academic management system doesn't make this difference. So you don't probably have this differentiating information in your external database.

But I guess we could add a couple of new options to catter for this.


If you run the enrol_database_sync.php script, you get the output in the screen (or in your mail, if you run it from cron in Linux/Unix). If you don't use the script and let the work be done when the users log in, you'll get the output in your webserver's logs (or wherever you are sending your PHP error logs).

The logs basically say which student/teacher has been enrolled/unenrolled into/from which course, which courses have been auto-created and any problems encountered (non-existent user, non-existent course, problems connecting to the external database, etc.).

I hope this helps you.

Saludos. Iñaki.

I have gotten around the patch question.  I was working too late last night.  I have found what I needed and successfully applied the patch.  However, I am now getting database errors when executing the sync script.  It complatins about being able to connect.  It is picking up the appropriate credentials as they are repeated correctly in the error message.  I successfully use a connection to the same database for external authentication so I know it should work.

Any ideas?

--Ron