Hey there, I have set up databases before with great success; however, I'm getting super frustrated with the one I just created. It works fine as far as gathering the information but when I tested it and viewed my test entry, the formatting is super weird. (see below). It's really hard to ready right now. 🙄
Moodle version 3.7.2. Adaptable 2.1.1.
Hi Stephanie,
OMG, you're a lifesaver!!! Thanks, Al!
That was super easy. Here you go!
Hi Stephanie,
Sorry to take so long to get something back to you. Had to deal with a family matter that took a while, and then I decided to do a little extra to this preset.
I changed the list view as it is not usually a good idea to have videos in that view. Can really slow down the page load time. I also formatted the List view, and if you should decide to edit it, you will need to disable the editor, or you might 'break' it.
I took the easy way out for fixing the 'jumbled' problem for the Single view, which is to make sure the field your using for video is outside the default table. Made the same change for the Add entry.
I added some CSS to the CSS template, that is used to format the list view and do the mouse over color changes.
I changed the name of all the fields. You were basically using descriptions for the field names and then not giving a description.
If you want to compare your database to this one, create a new database, then immediately go to the presets tab and import this preset. That way you have two database activities so you can compare and see the changes.
🤣🤣🤣Well ultimately, I want to learn how to fix it myself, but I sure do appreciate Al's help! He definitely gets a 5-star rating! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Does it have to look like this? - No, you can make it look like just about anything.
Can "View List" not just be a scrolling
list of the "View single" view but showing multiple entries? - Typically, if you make a scrolling list containing videos, the page become very slow to load because of all the large video files. That's why I have a "More" link that let's you go directly to the single view to watch the video.
If it has to stay like this, how would I change the colours or make the url to the video more noticeable because I didn't even realize that I had to click on my title "Test video" to access it, and I'm thinking my new Moodle users wouldn't notice that either. - Click on the Templates tab, then click on CSS template. Scroll down to where you see .trnormal td{. The background color can be entered in hexidecimal (e.g. #ffbf00) or as a color name. (e.g., lightblue, green, gold, etc.)
I'm not sure why these are so clunky when I find the rest of Moodle activities pretty easy to set up. - The database activity winds up being a little "clunky" because you are using a database to make a database, plus you also have to "build" the user interface, via templates, that controls what and how the users see the data. Like you, I struggled, when I first tried to use this activity years ago. I wound up just taking a preset for something like, Class Notes, and make changes to it to see what happened.
Sorry, I did not have more time to explain about this version of your database before, as I was trying to make it, plus test a new release of MooTYper on 12 versions of Moodle.
I have an idea for another list view, that does show the videos, a small sized version in List view and much larger version in Single view, but it all depends on your video sources. Are they ALL going to be YouTube videos? If so, it will work. Otherwise it won't. Let me know if they are to be YouTube only.
Hi Stephanie,
I have included another preset that does give you a much different look for the View list, View single, and Add entry. Feel free to change things, but be careful as the "good bits" regarding the video's can only be seen when the editor is disabled. Switching back and forth may make things break as the Atto editor sometimes "cleans" things when saving.
When making an entry, this version just needs the just last 11 characters of a YouTube URL.
If you want the video size on the View list page, to be larger, or smaller, there is a width and height setting, in the Repeated entry, section of the template. In the preset I have the size set to 160x90, but you can also use 320x180. With just five entries in my sample database, there is a noticeable lag in loading the page, before all the videos are ready. If you have many more files and just a few students, they can REALLY slow things down, especially if they start moving quickly from one page to another.
There is also a size for the View single, in it's template. In the preset it is 640x360, but you can go larger to 1280x720.
You can use other sizes, but if they are not optimal 4x3 ratios, you will get black bands, usually above and below the video picture.