Re: [WWdevel] maa webwork site? -- archived forum posts have bad dates.

[Sam H. <sh...@ma...>]

on 06/15/2007 08:05 AM Michael Gage said the following:

> On Jun 15, 2007, at 12:07 AM, Sam Hathaway wrote:
> 
>> on 06/14/2007 09:19 AM Michael Gage said the following:
>>
>>> I agree.  There is some hope that we can recover this eventually
>>> since I believe it is a one time
>>> data loss caused by the move.  The posts in the archive forum still
>>> have the date preserved on the internal
>>> data.  The newer posts from the last 6 months don't have any dates.
>>>
>>> As I said I'm still saving all of the original forums -- it may be
>>> that we'll need direct access to the mysql database
>>> on the maa machine in order to transfer the posts over with data.
>>> Except for the archived posts there are only a few hundred entries so
>>> it could be done somewhat manually.
>>>
>>> Anyone have any suggestions?
> Hi Sam,
> 
>> I'm wondering if it's possible to post each Frontier message as a
>> separate message in Moodle, rather than having an entire discussion  
>> end
>> up as a single Moodle message.
>>
> We could do a little custom programming that would output the  
> frontier database into xml.
> (Frontier has automatic xml creation from it's internal structures so  
> it wouldn't be too hard.)
> Then you'd have to transform it into some kind of xml that moodle  
> could read.

I would be willing to work on this if you think it would be useful.
Could you make an XML dump of the discussion site for me?

>> The one snag I can think of is that each message needs to have a user
>> associated with it, and we probably don't want to deal with the  
>> headache
>> of importing all the old users from the Frontier site.

Now that I think about it, we could define a dummy user ("Legacy
Discussions") and assign all posts to it.

>> As far as the posting dates go, dates seem to be part of the exported
>> XML file format -- the <POST> structure has <CREATED> and <MODIFIED>
>> field, and the <DISCUSSION> structure has a <TIMEMODIFIED> field  
>> (which
>> should probably match the <MODIFIED> parameter of the most recently
>> modified <POST> within it).
>>
>> So I guess I'm unclear on how the post times got lost in the first  
>> place.
> 
> I think it's a bug in the archiving method of moodle -- or perhaps  
> the unarchiving method.  If you look at the
> xml from the backup files you find    timestart=0 and timeend=0 .  If  
> I look in the database the time stamp is definitely 0.
> 
> It's kind of clear what data is missing.
> The question is how to fix it without direct access to the MAA database.

I did an export of the main course (course id 1, named "webwork") and
I'm seeing valid dates in the <CREATED> and <MODIFIED> fields of each
post. For example:

<MOODLE_BACKUP>
 <COURSE>
  <MODULES>
   <MOD>
    <ID>1</ID>
    <MODTYPE>forum</MODTYPE>
    <TYPE>news</TYPE>
    <NAME>Site news</NAME>
    <INTRO>General news and announcements.</INTRO>
    <DISCUSSIONS>
     <DISCUSSION>
      <ID>1</ID>
      <NAME>Experimental WeBWorK Documentation and Discussion Group
Site</NAME>
# <ID> of first <POST>
      <FIRSTPOST>1</FIRSTPOST>
      <USERID>4</USERID>
      <GROUPID>-1</GROUPID>
      <ASSESSED>1</ASSESSED>
# <MODIFIED> of most recently modified <POST>?
      <TIMEMODIFIED>1164156062</TIMEMODIFIED>
# <USERID> of most recently modified <POST>?
      <USERMODIFIED>4</USERMODIFIED>
# No idea what these are...
      <TIMESTART>0</TIMESTART>
      <TIMEEND>0</TIMEEND>
      <POSTS>
       <POST>
        <ID>1</ID>
        <PARENT>0</PARENT>
        <USERID>4</USERID>
# Translates as Tue Nov 21 19:30:59 2006, which is correct
        <CREATED>1164155459</CREATED>
# Translates as Tue Nov 21 19:41:02 2006, which is correct
        <MODIFIED>1164156062</MODIFIED>
        <MAILED>1</MAILED>
        <SUBJECT>Experimental WeBWorK Documentation and Discussion Group
Site</SUBJECT>
        <MESSAGE>...</MESSAGE>
       </POST>
      </POSTS>
     </DISCUSSION>
    </DISCUSSIONS>
   </MOD>
  </MODULES>
 </COURSE>
</MOODLE_BACKUP>

Getting an export of the "main" course was somewhat difficult. I
couldn't find a way to do it through the UI -- I had to go into another
course and click "Backup", then replace the id parameter in the URL with
id=1. How did you do it?

> While we're on the subject I'm having trouble handling "student  
> enrollments" on the MAA moodle as well.  I created the AIM course
> for this upcoming workshop and it seems to have automatically  
> enrolled all the current members of the site -- and when I try to
> unenroll them nothing happens.  ????  I haven't been able to track  
> this one down.  I'll try to duplicate it on my local copy of moodle.

I'm seeing 77 users listed as participants in the aimWW course, and all
of them have a "current role" of "student". However, when I go into the
"Assign roles" screen, it lists all roles having 0 users.

I don't see any place to unenrol users, and there's nothing in the
course settings about automatically enrolling users.
-sam