Just to set the stage. I'm a really novice programmer, and only heard
about Moodle 2 days ago. I've got a project assigned to me to make a
plugin that when a user submits a file for an assignment, it changes the
name of the file ("studentname-course.[extension]"), and sends the
completed file somewhere else on the machine that uploads it to dropbox
(I've already got a dropbox setup). I'm not looking for a full answer,
but if someone could point me in the right direction I would so very
much appreciate it.
You need to create an event observer, probably for the \mod_assign\event\assessable_submitted event (for a full list of events go to /report/eventlist/index.php on your Moodle). This task will be defined in /mod/assign/classes/event/assessable_submitted.php.
More info on Events: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Events_API
You'll eventually get to the files table. In Moodle, files are renamed with a hash of the file contents. This is done to reduce duplication. With the hash, you can use the first two pairs of hex numbers to find the original file. These docs might be useful: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/File_API_internals.
More info on Events: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Events_API
You'll eventually get to the files table. In Moodle, files are renamed with a hash of the file contents. This is done to reduce duplication. With the hash, you can use the first two pairs of hex numbers to find the original file. These docs might be useful: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/File_API_internals.
In your implementation, I would recommend you spin out an adhoc task to do the file shifting, as moving files during an event observer event might impact the user experience. https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Task_API