Best practice forum (Archived)

Totara Face-To-Face (F2F / ILT) Default Notification Messages Behavior

Perhaps all of the following has been discussed previously in these forums, but I didn't search for it. Since I went through the trouble of discovering this, I wanted to share it and also have this information for reference in the future. Also (perhaps I missed it) I did not see this behavior documented in the help site at http://help.totaralms.com/Face-to-face_notifications.htm. This information is all based upon Totara 2.5.6.

One might expect face-to-face notification templates configured at Site administration / ▶ Plugins / ▶ Activity modules / ▶ Face-to-face / ▶ Notification templates to affect all new and/or existing instances of F2F activity modules' notification messages. This is not the case.

When you create a new F2F activity in a course, the notification messages applied to the new F2F instance are based upon the current language strings within the face to face activity module. F2F notification messages are not copied from the F2F notification templates. The notification messages within a newly created F2F activity default to the language strings that existed at the time when the F2F activity was created. Any new changes to F2F notification templates and strings do not change any notification messages in existing F2F activities. Any changes to F2F notification templates also do not affect existing F2F activities.

Why was behavior important to understand in the circumstances I was dealt? Because I was asked if changing the F2F notification templates would change the default notification messages in some 70 existing F2F activities. In this case, the answer was, "no", changing the notification message templates has no effect whatsoever on existing instances the F2F activity. At first I thought that new F2F activity's default notification messages were based on the F2F notification templates, but after some exploration I realized that the default messages are based on language strings.

In conclusion, if you want to change the default F2F notification messages that are applied to newly created F2F activities, then you must customize some language strings in the facetoface.php language strings module. If you want to update all notification messages in all currently existing F2F activities in a batch, then you must perform some SQL queries (which we ended up doing). If you have a small number of F2F activities, then changing each message via the user interface definitely works.

I definitely appreciate any corrections or additional information anyone may have.

Finally, if you want to change the F2F default notification messages, then look for the following language strings for customization:

defaultcancellationinstrmngrdefault
defaultcancellationmessagedefault
defaultcancellationsubjectdefault
defaultdeclineinstrmngrdefault
defaultdeclinemessagedefault
defaultdeclinesubjectdefault
defaultconfirmationinstrmngrdefault
defaultconfirmationmessagedefault
defaultconfirmationsubjectdefault
defaultdatetimechangemessagedefault
defaultdatetimechangesubjectdefault
defaultreminderinstrmngrdefault
defaultremindermessagedefault
defaultremindersubjectdefault
defaultrequestinstrmngrdefault
defaultrequestmessagedefault
defaultrequestsubjectdefault
defaulttrainerconfirmationmessagedefault
defaulttrainerconfirmationsubjectdefault
defaulttrainersessioncancellationmessagedefault
defaulttrainersessioncancellationsubjectdefault
defaulttrainersessionunassignedmessagedefault
defaulttrainersessionunassignedsubjectdefault
defaultwaitlistedmessagedefault
defaultwaitlistedsubjectdefault

Permalink | Reply

Thanks for the research Jamie, definitely looks like that whole area could do with a bit of refactoring!

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi,

I must admit it has been confusing, I've been experiencing exactly the same issues with regard to needing the change the template at site level and the changes not being replicated at activity level - are Totara going to look at this?

Also, when we add 'details' to a specific session this isn't appearing in the [details] section of the notification only in the iCal attachment. I've tried re-attaching a new notification template just in case it needed a refresh following the addition of some details but this hasn't worked either?? Any help, gratefully received.

Steph

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Second this.There seems to be no logic in the settings. The site notification settings should flow down to the activity level.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi All,

Our developer has created a method where with one click you can overwrite all of the templates in all face to face sessions with the notification templates. If you are interested in this i can have them send the information on to Totara.

John

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi John,

Please do as this seems to be a problem for a few end-users, and we'll see if we can get your modification merged into core.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Thanks John!!!

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

The template table mdl_facetoface_notification_tpl
only contain these fields

title, body, managerprefix and status

mdl_facetoface_notification have additional fields that state when a message is sent.

booked, waitlisted, cancelled

This means that it's not an ideal situation to copy f2f notification templates into f2f notifications in bulk as they won't have any state for when a notification is sent.

---

Totara creates default notifications with some hard coded definitions:

eg.

    $confirmation = new facetoface_notification($defaults, false);
    $confirmation->title = get_string('setting:defaultconfirmationsubjectdefault', 'facetoface');
    $confirmation->body = text_to_html(get_string('setting:defaultconfirmationmessagedefault', 'facetoface'));
    $confirmation->managerprefix = text_to_html(get_string('setting:defaultconfirmationinstrmngrdefault', 'facetoface'));
    $confirmation->conditiontype = MDL_F2F_CONDITION_BOOKING_CONFIRMATION;
    $confirmation->ccmanager = 1;
    $confirmation->save();

---

For our issue, we had a case where notifications were entirely missing for several f2f sessions and needed a way to quickly repopulate them with the default notifications.

Refer to the attachment for more information

reset_notifications.php

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Ciaran,

A customer of ours is asking whether this modification actually ended up being merged into core. Do you have any information?

Thanks,

Cristiano

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Cristiano,

This is a feature we will be releasing in 2.9 as per here. FYI Ciaran has moved onto pastures new!

cheers,

George.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi George,

Thanks for the quick response!

Cheers

Cristiano

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Would it be possible to get a copy of this code as we require an update to all of our messages. I understand it is being added to 2.9 but that will be a long way away from our current 2.6.

Thanks in advance.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Improvement TL-4379 - Facetoface notification templates not working as expected has been included in Totara 2.7.8 which was released on October 20, 2015.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Scott,

This is great and will save loads of time - thanks.

Please could you confirm: when we alter a template and it automatically filters into activities were it has already been attached will it resend all the notifications again?

S...

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Scott

We'd be interested to know too as we have this issue at the moment in 2.6 and will be moving to 2.7 shortly.

Thanks

Rita

Permalink | Show parent | Reply