Hi David, thanks for taking a look at this. I forgot to include a disclaimer that this plugin needs a bit of TLC on the UI side and has a lot of historical baggage in terms of functionality etc.

I will look into fixing the SQL issue and check whether there is any agreement here to change to a capability instead of selecting a role. We do use that in most of our plugins so it might be ok with everyone.

I have fixed the SQL issue and handled the deprecated code. Our resources are currently focused on our Moodle upgrade so unfortunately we won't be making any changes to the UI or functionality at this point.

Thanks David, I have added the missing single quotes around the concatenated hyphen which fixes the issue.

Geat plugin, but when I installed the new update 2015060100 I'm receiving an error:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Hi Dimitar, thanks for the report. Could you log this in our issue tracker (the link is above) and give us details of your server, Moodle version and whether you have installed any other new plugins recently? The code runs fine on our systems (Windows / Linux, MySQL / Postgres) so it would be hard to know what the problem is from just the information you gave so far. You could also turn developer debugging on and press F12 and check for errors on the Network tab and include this information.

Hello, Barry! Problem is solved on my Moodle 2.8. Permissions on files were 666 and this returns an error: file is writable by others. I changed them to 644 and now everything is fine. Thanks again for the great plugin!

I have updated the UI of the form a bit (See attached screenshot). For editing teachers / admins there is now a progress bar (similar to the progress bar found in the core backup / import screens) at the top and instance info and options lists are now displayed in tables thereby improving readability and making the process clearer.

Dear Developers,
Many thanks for sharing this wonderful plugins with us. The auto allocation is really a good idea. And it is also easy for us to export the result into an excel.
But after I installed this plugin in the latest version of Moodle, I found the allocation form is always waiting for process and no result comes out.
Following is the version information of our environment:
Version: 3.1 (2016052300)
Release: 05.23.2016
PHP: 5.6.20
MySQL: 5.7.12

Could you help with this issue?
Many thanks.
Best wishes,
Lina

Hi Barry. Many thanks for providing this plugin to the community; its functionality is really appreciated by our staff and students, and we’re really grateful to you for your efforts to maintain and update it.

On that note, please could I quickly query whether you have any plans to update the plugin to be fully compatible with Moodle v3.1, and its new Global Search feature in particular? To clarify: while we’ve tested the Allocation form plugin under v3.1 and all of the core functionality seems to work fine, we’ve found that instances of the activity are not searchable via v3.1’s Global Search feature. Please see the following screenshot for details, which lists all of the available areas that can searched under v3.1 (note that these settings are available via: Site Administration -> Plugins -> Search -> Manage Global Search):

http://imgur.com/lWWQByE

Note also that the above screenshot was taken on a v3.1 system where the Allocation form plugin is installed and available. However, as you can see, the Allocation form activity is not listed as being available to be searched. Obviously, this is likely to be a significant problem/cause of confusion for users who might want to search for specific instances of the Allocation form activity across Moodle.

I’m not a developer, but my understanding is that mod plugins can be made searchable relatively easily via the addition of a new search class within the plugin’s codebase (located at ../classes/search/activity.php). Please see the following for further details:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=334938
https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Global_search
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Search_API

We really hope this search capability can be added to Allocation form as I’m sure it would be a huge benefit to our users (as well as those of other v3.1 systems) and, again, many thanks for all your efforts to develop this plugin and share it with the community.

Best wishes,
Lina

Short answer: During the first half of 2017
Long Answer: The University of Nottingham plan to upgrade to a 3.x version of Moodle for our academic year 17-18 (by Sept 2017). Therefore we will fix any issues on 3.x as part of our upgrade preparation. This usually takes place Jan-Apr.

Thanks a lot for the reply and we will be looking forward to the new release.
Best wishes,
Lina

Hi,

Before I test this plugin, could you tell me whether it might (or not) address the following scenario :

We have several hundreds of students in health who must take part in a 3-month internship in either schools, hospitals, rest homes and so on all across the whole region, (different places).
These students all have a specialism (e.g. medicine ; nursery ; physiotherapy...) and their allocation should be made in such a way as to always end with interprofessional groups of 5 students, (i.e. groups should be made of 5 students max and include at least 2 different specialisms ; e.g. : group A could be made of 2 medicine students + 3 nurse students, while group B could be made of 2 med students + 2 nurse students + 1 physiotherapy student...).

Would you say this is something we could do using the allocation form plugin ?

Thanks for helping,
Best,

Yannick

Hi Yannick,

The plugin will not handle that.

It is designed for scenarios where some options are more popular than the numbers of spaces on them and you want a way that is not fist come first served for allocating the places. The only thing it considers about the student during allocations are the choices they made.