I'm trying to import course content from WebCT into Moodle, i've written a java tool which can take the IMS standards based export from WebCT and convert it into moodle back up format which can then be imported into moodle in the normal way. I have quite a lot of seperate courses to import and so far most of the course material i've tried seems to work reliably, however, i'm having trouble with one specific course which is significantly larger than the other courses i'm attempting to import.
I've got a course with 17 topics and approx 263 resources displayed within these topics which seems to work fine and so far every course I have tried which is smaller than this has worked fine.
However, out biggest course is 33 sections with 1624 resources displayed in these sections (I realise that this isn't ideal and will probably re-arrange this course once i've got it working in moodle), the problem is that a course of this size dosn't display properly on the moodle course home page. Basically the title of each menu item is missing (along with it's associated link). I've included a screen shot to demonstrate the problem. When you click on the editing links for any given item, all of the information for link is correctly shown, eg Name, Type of Resource, Summary and the file linked to, so the information is there, it's just being ignored. The names for all the resources are also correctly displayed in the messages in the restore course window.
I can only think of two reasons why this would be happening :
1 : I've made some kind of subtle mistake when generating the moodle.xml file which only shows up with large courses. I've audited my code and the XML it produces and can't see anything wrong, but there is always the possiblity. If anybody wants to have a look at the backup file i'm creating, I can email it seperatly if you let me know.
2 : There is some kind of bug in moodle which is only apparant when you have a large number of resources on the front page. I am running a 1.2 developement version downloaded last week (2003120700), mainly because 1.1 had a one or two useful features missing, so it could be a transient problem. Might try downloading the latest snapshot later today and see if that fixes the problem.
Any ideas ?
Thanks Tim W
Ahh, this one has popped up a few times before.
Have a search for disappearing resources in the forums.
You need to do a small tweak to one of the database tables and behold, your content will reappear. It happened to me in a course with around 300 resources.
---< Later >---
Ahh, here we are:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3628&parent=16044
Have a search for disappearing resources in the forums.
You need to do a small tweak to one of the database tables and behold, your content will reappear. It happened to me in a course with around 300 resources.
---< Later >---
Ahh, here we are:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3628&parent=16044
It works. Hooray ! Thankyou.
Now, back to this fascinating Java tool 
Can you make it available here? What was required (ie what does it do exactly?)
Can you make it available here? What was required (ie what does it do exactly?)
It does (or will do when i've finished it, am working on it as we speak) the following :
1 : Course content including the menus and structure of course pages
2 : Glosaries
3 : Simple Quizzes
It's not intended to be a complete import solution, just the stuff I need and it's a bit of a hack, with bits and bobs randomly copied from other programmes i've written.
At the present time course content will import with reasonably nice menu structures, but with broken images due to the way the image tags in some of our courses are written, this may or may not be a problem for other people. I'm working on a fix for this at the moment. Glossaries work, but you can only have one per course (because that's all we have). I haven't done quizzes yet, maybe tomorrow. There will not be any importing of user data.
It's actually designed to work on the IMS compliant learning modules that can be exported from webct using the tool provided by webct, rather than on webct files directly. The format is easier to work with than webct's own files (I did once build an export tool that worked on these files, trust me, they are horrid...) so it also has the potential to work with IMS compliant files from other platforms, though i'm writing this on the basis of what webct actually produces, rather than the original IMS spec, so there might be too many assumtions in there fort it too actually function.
You'll need to look at http://www.webct.com/ims to find out more about the webct export tool.
Once i've got this working I should be able to put together some kind of release, as long as people accept a massive health warning on it's reliability.
In case anybody is wondering, I only started working on this last friday, so it's pretty basic. I would have done this as a direct addition to moodle in PHP, but I don't know any PHP and am in a hurry to build something that works.
I'm hoping that if I can get all this working, I can persuade my boss to switch from WebCT to Moodle.
1 : Course content including the menus and structure of course pages
2 : Glosaries
3 : Simple Quizzes
It's not intended to be a complete import solution, just the stuff I need and it's a bit of a hack, with bits and bobs randomly copied from other programmes i've written.
At the present time course content will import with reasonably nice menu structures, but with broken images due to the way the image tags in some of our courses are written, this may or may not be a problem for other people. I'm working on a fix for this at the moment. Glossaries work, but you can only have one per course (because that's all we have). I haven't done quizzes yet, maybe tomorrow
It's actually designed to work on the IMS compliant learning modules that can be exported from webct using the tool provided by webct, rather than on webct files directly. The format is easier to work with than webct's own files (I did once build an export tool that worked on these files, trust me, they are horrid...) so it also has the potential to work with IMS compliant files from other platforms, though i'm writing this on the basis of what webct actually produces, rather than the original IMS spec, so there might be too many assumtions in there fort it too actually function.
You'll need to look at http://www.webct.com/ims to find out more about the webct export tool.
Once i've got this working I should be able to put together some kind of release, as long as people accept a massive health warning on it's reliability.
In case anybody is wondering, I only started working on this last friday, so it's pretty basic. I would have done this as a direct addition to moodle in PHP, but I don't know any PHP and am in a hurry to build something that works.
I'm hoping that if I can get all this working, I can persuade my boss to switch from WebCT to Moodle.