Itamar Tzadok

Alternatively you can try the following. Export the questions (one set at a time so that the export file won't be too big) in Moodle XML format. Open the file in a text editor and search/replace the string <answernumbering>abc</answernumbering> with the string <answernumbering>none</answernumbering>. Then move the original questions to a temp category, import the updated set and if everything is okay you can delete the old set.

When you work on the template you need to disable editor and then add an HTML table divided between the sections:

header section

<table><tbody>
<tr>
<th>header1</th>
<th>header2</th>
</tr>

body section

<tr>
<td>||Field1||</td>
<td>||Field2||</td>
</tr>

footer section

</tbody></table>

Is the quiz set to "Each attempt builds on the last"? This preserves previous responses but I don't know if it works with essay questions because I don't use such questions, at least not in any ordinary way. At any rate, if you use essay questions then you probably mark responses manually; and if the quiz consists of only these questions then why not use a database activity instead? You can set the entry form to contain 3 text areas and allow students to edit their entry until the assignment is due, and then you can use 'rating' to grade the work and the grade goes to the gradebook. Or you can set the entry form per question and students need to add three entries &c. and you can use groups and set the database to separate groups &c. Hope this helps.

You can use javascript to read the user name from the login info on the page and run search. Of course you may have users with the same name in which case the search result will show more than is actually required. So you can extract from the login info the Moodle user id rather than the user name and this should be unique (needless to say you need to have the ##user## in the list view for this to work).

Just getting into the discussion so not sure I see the whole picture. Why not using two databases, one for the catalog an another one for reservations and loans. The catalog consists of Title, Author, Subject, Cover image, etc. (as suggested above) and managed by the librarians. Users can view the catalogue and request items. An item may be requested either from the list view or from the single view by clicking a certain link which opens a popup window (or just another tab depending on your preferences) with the user's add entry form in the reservations database and paste the item's id (and other details if necessary) into the relevant fields. The user then can add to the form other relevant info such as date after which the item is not needed or comments and submit.

Now the reservations database can be set to separate groups and each user should have his/her own group. This way each user can see only his/her own reservations in the database while the librarians can see all users. The database may be set to require approval and librarians can approve checked out items and the list view may be set to display for the user which items are checked out ("approved") and which are still pending by means of different colors or other formatting. A more flexible approach would be to use rating but currently this value is displayed only in the single view and displaying it in the list view so as to make tracking more user friendly requires hacking the code. The reservations database can be used also for history of loans and statistics.

That's just off the top of my head and some of the suggestion may require further exploration. Hope this helps in any way.