General developer forum

No worries, this is easy. When you assign a role, these are stored in mdl_role_assignments, that's all you need to add to. It basically takes these three fields (I am assuming the course and user both exist):

role id - the id in mdl_role of the row with shortname 'student'

context id - the id in mdl_context with contextlevel 50 (=CONTEXT_COURSE) and instanceid = mdl_course id of the course you want to enrol them in

user id - the user's id in mdl_user

Incidentally, there are also fields timestart and timeend in mdl_role_assignments. Neither of them work as expected - timestart doesn't do anything at all [I provided a patch to make it work, in MDL-8789, but this hasn't been accepted] and timeend does work (Moodle will delete enrolments when they 'expire') but only if you turn on the 'limited length enrolments' option for the course, which you probably don't want to.

So basically you might be tempted to look at the table and think 'hm, cool, we can make our database fill those in and it will automatically allow students into the site at the right date, then remove their access when the course is over'. That's what we thought too! But don't do that unless you fancy fixing the code yourself (as we had to - and no we didn't find out about this until somebody complained that students could access a website before it was ready).

As for the practice of inserting stuff in the database directly, not doing a proper role_assign call doesn't appear to cause us any problems. It is probably a good idea to leave role_unassign to Moodle though (i.e. don't delete rows from the table yourself) as this handles other functions such as deleting forum subscriptions, iirc.

--sam