Moodle in English: Unable to add questions to quiz because it has no sections

Unable to add questions to quiz because it has no sections

by Susana L. - Saturday, May 30, 2020, 1:36 AM

Hi,

I found out that I'm unable to add questions to a quiz in our production server because it doesn't have any section associated to it.
That is something unique (among more than 5K quizzes), and it really puzzles me. How could that happen?

Checking the database:
select id from mdl_quiz where id not in (select quizid from mdl_quiz_sections);
id
-----
269
(1 row)

Checking the course logs I could find that the quiz was created in August 2019, and it had questions before... so it was not a problem in the quiz creation process... Is there some chance that the single section has been deleted?

If someone experienced something similar or if someone has a clue about what is going on please let me know.

Thank you!

Re: Unable to add questions to quiz because it has no sections

by Tim Hunt - Saturday, May 30, 2020, 3:43 AM

If you are happy working in the database, you might be able to fix this.

First, make a new quiz somewhere (but don't add any questions), and then look at the data you get in the quiz_sections and quiz_slots table for that.

Then, look in those two tables, for the broken quiz id, and compare the differences.

If you feel confident, add manually fix the data for the broken quiz. (From the error message, it looks like you are missing a row in the quiz_sections table.)

However, please be very careful editing directly in the database.

Average of ratings:Useful (2)

Re: Unable to add questions to quiz because it has no sections

by Susana L. - Monday, June 1, 2020, 6:17 PM

Hi Tim,

Thank you for your input.

Yes, the row is missing. But I don't care much about that specific quiz... and I avoid editing directly in the database, specially in production. My concern is that something is interfering with the consistency of the database, and I wanted to understand how it happened and avoid future problems.

Regarding your answer this doesn't seem to be such a strange problem (right?), however I don't find any reports of similar situations, nor bugs related to it... and I have no way of reproducing such a feat Please share If you have any idea what may have caused this situation.

Thank you!

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Re: Unable to add questions to quiz because it has no sections

by Tim Hunt - Monday, June 1, 2020, 7:27 PM

Acutally, I think this is a strange problem. I don't recall seeing it before. If you do manage to reproduce it, let me know. Otherwise, I think it is OK to just ingore this as a one-off.

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Unable to add questions to quiz because it has no sections