Moodle in English: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Perry Way - Friday, July 23, 2021, 6:50 AM

Is it possible to award a Site Badge without using "criteria"?

I am being asked to program in an ability to award Badges to specific students for specific reasons, driven by data outside of Moodle. I plan to create the necessary software and data tables to house the data to be used for this task. But first I want to know is it possible? I haven't worked with Badges before. I read this bit on the Using Badges link (https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/Using_badges#Adding_a_site_badge) and it doesn't answer this question unless the answer is no, criteria is the only way to award a site badge:

Adding a site badge

An administrator can add a site badge from Site administration / Badges / Add a new badge.
While the settings are basically the same as for a teacher in a course, the criteria are slightly different because of the global nature of the badge. These are: manual issue by role; completing a set of courses or profile completion, cohort membership and previously awarded badges. As part of the profile completion criteria, a badge may be awarded for uploading a profile picture.
In order to be able to award a site badge based on completing one or more courses, completion tracking needs to be enabled in the site and relevant courses. In each course, activity completion must be set for the chosen activities, which must be then checked in the course completion settings.

Badge criteria for site badges

Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Mary Cooch - Friday, July 23, 2021, 2:58 PM

Hello Perry. You mean - you need to award a site badge automatically based on different criteria from the ones already there? Because otherwise they could simply be manually awarded at will by someone with permissions to award site badges.

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Perry Way - Friday, July 23, 2021, 10:33 PM

Hi Mary,

Yes, I want to use external processes to award a site badge. However, first I would like to know how someone goes about awarding a site badge manually. Maybe I overlooked a feature somewhere but I was unable to ascertain how to do that. Is that process detailed in documentation and I'm just ignorant of that?

How I figured was once I know how to award one manually, I'll dig into the code and figure out what kind of native PHP needs to be called and utilize that as my mechanism for awarding them, but driven by external data in a CLI program.

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Perry Way - Friday, July 23, 2021, 11:56 PM

Hi Mary, I did some poking around and figured out what was missing. I am the site administrator and apparently site administrators cannot create badges and award them. So I had to create a special role to award badges and I gave myself that role and now I can.

I find it kind of unusual that the site administrator cannot do something though. In all the other systems I've created or worked on or worked with the site administrator or master administrator account(s) can do anything under the sun.

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Mary Cooch - Saturday, July 24, 2021, 12:04 AM

Hello Perry. Site admins can award badges - they can indeed do anything - it just that when you select "manual issue by role" there is no site admin there - you dont need to create any new roles or change anything -you just select one of the available roles -manager for example -and then continue to award the badge. (Site admin is not a "role" as such as they literally can do anything. Remember they don't appear in admin/roles/manage.php)

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Perry Way - Saturday, July 24, 2021, 12:42 AM

Understood Mary, but here's the dilemma I faced, we don't want Managers to assign these specific badges manually. So that's why when I got to that place I decided to create a special role just for this task. The program I will be creating will use a new account I create just for the purpose of this task. So I needed a role anyway for that.

As for being able to award the badge, until I created that role and then added it to the badge settings, I was unable to award that badge even as the site administrator. However, after I added that role the capability to award it was provided to me.

Just for clarity sake, are you claiming that the site administrator should be able to award badges manually without any role selected in the badge settings? Or would any role selected (like Manager for example) just automatically include the administrator account and so if I allowed Manager role to award them then I wouldn't need to specifically have that role assigned to my account because it is assumed that the admin account has that role automatically?

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Randy Thornton - Saturday, July 24, 2021, 1:18 AM

Perry,

Just as Mary says. It is the second of your options: you must check at least one role in the criteria list or it won't let you create the badge. You have to choose at least one role, but regardless of which role you choose, any Administrator can manually award the badge anyway without any other bother.

I usually pick Non-editing teacher, since it is highly unlikely you have set such a role on the front page of the site. Effectively, it means only Administrators can then award such a badge. (That's the lazy way of course: making a specific site level Badge awarder type role is the better way ;).

I don't choose Manager unless I really intend for site Managers to be awarding site badges.

Randy

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Mary Cooch - Saturday, July 24, 2021, 1:18 AM

As a site admin with just the site admin role and no others, you can set up a site badge and click Manual issue by role. Then just pick a role - any role - and you will be allowed to continue to award the badge. You can try on sandbox.moodledemo.net if you like. (I did)

There is a site badge awarder role here: Site badge awarder

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Re: Awarding a Site Badge without using criteria

by Perry Way - Tuesday, August 10, 2021, 5:03 AM

Hello Mary,

Yahoo!!! I did it! I have created my program that integrates with our back office School Management System and it will now insert records into the Moodle database that then trigger the automated awarding of badges.

I post this in case someone out there wants to do something similar I can help guide them through the process.

Perry

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