Quiz

For Moodle 1.9, I think I have just fixed the following:

MDL-8682: Pressing enter when answering a short answer question can submit the wrong one
MDL-9451: Quiz answers can be lost if user navigates before page reloads

and I want to explain what I have done so that

a) you know what changes are coming up; and
b) you can sanity check what I have done, and tell me if I have been silly.

For the first bug, basically, I have made it ignore the enter key (unless you are typing into a HTML editor or text box) except where the keyboard focus is on a submit button. That mean, when you are typing into a shortanswer question, you can't submit the quiz by pressing enter/return. However, you can tab to the submit button and press enter to submit the question or whole quiz.

For the second one, I am not 100% sure the change I have made fixes the problem. What was happening was that, if you navigated to another page of the quiz before the whole page had finished loading, the student's answers were overwritten with a blank answer. Now what should happen is that no answers are saved unless the whole quiz is loaded. So if you click the wrong page, you can quickly click on another page without having to wait for the whole page to load.

Now, the only way you can lose and answer is if you are on a slow server with a quiz page with loads of questions on it, and while the page is still loading, your answer a question near the top and submit it. I think this is pretty unlikely, while the existing bug was happening to people.


Also, I fixed MDL-11463: The quiz uses two different timers, which is silly. Basically, for quizzes with a time limit, it showed the countdown clock which submits the quiz just before the time runs out; while for quizzes with no time limit, if you were less than a day from the close date, it put a countdown in the browser's title bar! Now, it just uses the countdown clock, and it displays it on the page for quizzes with a time limit, or if you are less than an hour from the close date.


Anyone who can test these changes in 1.9 beta+ will earn my gratitude (and a pint of beer if you come to the UK Moodle Moot next month). Thanks.