Best practice forum (Archived)

Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports

 
Ira Felinski
Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Tuesday, 6 March 2012, 6:03 PM
 

Hi,

After experimenting with the custom reports based on the Individual Feedback Responses for feedback activities. I noticed that only 'text input' responses were actually shown in the report as answers to questions. Also that the other questions involving graph or mulit-choice answers were not included as options in the reporting.

Is it possible to also display Graphs and other multi-choice answer information in the custom reports? The fact that this information is missing makes these types of reports very ineffective in capturing all the relevant data in my opinion.

I believe that similar work was done for Austen Sinclair with NZ inland revenue...

-Ira

Craig Eves
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Tuesday, 6 March 2012, 6:52 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira

I tried adding a multi choice and numeric question to a feedback on the demo site and was able to get the answers showing up in the Anlalysis tab.

Is this the type of report you were wanting - are you doing this through the report builder? I'll have a look at the report builder or maybe the activity group which also has some analysis tools.

feedback image

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 6:22 PM
 

Hi Craig,

Yes, i know you get this in the Analysis tab - but you can only filter analysis tab reports by course groups.

I want the same graph and choice response information to appear in Custom Report builder reports.

thanks,

-Ira

Austen Sinclair
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Austen Sinclair - Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 1:35 PM
Group PartnersGroup TXP Site Administrator

Hi Ira

I've attached my presentation to last year's iMoot on our L1 process.  On reflection it's a custom report we had made to display the L1 graphically to Trainers (and worth every cent).

Happy to share the code for this and we'll be having this maintained for the foreseeable future.

Cheers
Austen

PS: Apologies for the poor quality of images (had to squeeze a lot to fit within 500k)

Craig Eves
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 2:34 PM
Group Totara

Hi Austen

Thanks for sharing this, its good to see Totara being extended. The process is well documented - hopefully most people follow the documented process!

One question about the tags, do you use these in activity groups in Totara to help aggregate the feedbacks? and what other areas do you use tags for.

cheers

Craig

Austen Sinclair
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Austen Sinclair - Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 3:45 PM
Group PartnersGroup TXP Site Administrator

Hi Craig

Originally, we saw no business value in Tags and gave them to our Team Leaders (who run a sort-of-social-network-site inside the LMS) to use as they saw fit.

We've reclaimed Tags a little just to identify:

  • Feedback instances used for centrally reported L1 data, and
  • Identify course pages by broad category of training type.

In both cases this uses Official Tags (i.e. can only be created at a site level).

Cheers
Austen

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 6:32 PM
 

Hi Austen,

The part I'm most interested in is Step 8 of the presentation PDF.

If you are willing to share i would love a copy of the code for the custom report to test on our Totara build. Can you email it to me?

Thanks,

-Ira

PS: Images looked fine on my work PC smile

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Thursday, 8 March 2012, 1:33 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira,

I think most of that functionality actually made it into Totara. The difficulity with it is that in order to aggregate the data into a report, every course has to use the same set of questions, and the system needs some way of identifing what feedbacks to include and which set of questions to use.

This was implemented using 'activity groups' and course tags. So to set things up:

1. Create a feedback activity that uses the same questions across multiple courses

2. Enable course tags, and tag all the courses with the same tag

3. Go to Reports > Report Builder > Activity Groups and create a new group. You'll need to select the tag from 2. and also choose one feedback activity to be the one that the system treats as "representative" of the whole group. If a question doesn't appear in the "representative" activity it won't show up in the report.

4. Once you've done that, you should see a couple of new report sources appear on the Manage Reports page, Feedback Questions and Graphical Feedback Questions. You'll get one of each source for every activity group you define

5. Creating a graphical report based should give you something similar to what Austen has in his slide.

6. You may need to run the cron a couple of times get the results to actually appear.

I'm not 100% sure this functionality all works in Totara as it's not really been fully tested, but you could give it a go and see if it works for you.

Good luck!

Simon

Craig Eves
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Sunday, 11 March 2012, 4:27 PM
Group Totara

Hi Simon

I  tried the activity groups out and the non graphical questions are available and showing in the report builder using activity groups to group these.

When I created a report for the graphical feedback questions,  I wasn't able to get a graph for this activity displaying. I tried  running the cron job and refreshing activity group. The column used in the report builder was called Feedback Activity - I couldn't see any other columns realated to feedback.

Craig

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Sunday, 11 March 2012, 5:17 PM
Group Totara

Thanks Craig,

That looks like a bug, I'll get a fix out.

Simon

Ciaran Irvine (Core Developer)
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ciaran Irvine (Core Developer) - Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 2:09 PM
 

Hi folks,

a fix for the grouped reports issue was included in today's release of versions 1.0.34 and 1.1.13

Ciaran

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 2:46 PM
 

Hi Craig,

I have tried all those steps on both our live and development Totara sites. I get the same results - no graphical or choice question answers are shown in the custom reports.

I have tried this on multiple versions:

  • Development Site - Totara LMS v1.1.12
  • Live Site - Totara LMS v1.1.3

Any other suggestions?

I believe Austen had some custom code developed to enable this functionality in the custom reports...

-Ira

Craig Eves
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 6:05 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira

I also wasn't able to get the choices to display with the graphical feedback field in the report builder, this bug will be looked at to fix

In the meantime Austen's code looks as though it will produce some graphical analysis , Austen has kindly said he is happy to share this code in a previous post.

Craig 

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 9:50 PM
 

Hi Craig,

I'm not even able to get ANY choice question answers in the custom reports, let alone graphical representations of these answers.

This result is the same for both report sources:

  • Feedback questions
  • Feedback graphical questions

The fact that not even a text display of the choice question answer is appearing in the custom report suggests that there is a disconnect/bug somehere.

I'll try and get a copy of the code from Austen.

-Ira

 

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Thursday, 15 March 2012, 12:37 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira,

Yes there was a bug that prevented the reports from being displayed at all, it has been fixed in 1.1.13 and 1.0.34.

Simon

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Sunday, 18 March 2012, 10:51 PM
 

HI Simon,

I've upgraded one of our dev sites to version 1.1.13 and i'm still not getting any improvement with multichoice answers/repsonses or graphs displaying in the custom reports. The related questions don't even appear as columns to be added to the custom reports.

I even create new tags, activity groups and reports with the new sources - but still missing certain question's responses.

Any ideas?

-Ira

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Monday, 19 March 2012, 12:48 PM
Group Totara

Could you try turning developer debugging on and visiting the page to see if there are any errors? Also, maybe you could post a screenshot of what you do see when you go to view a graphical report.

Simon

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Monday, 19 March 2012, 10:00 PM
 

Hi Simon,

This is the error that is dislaying on the custom grpahical report page with Developer debugging on:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /var/www/html/academy/local/reportbuilder/lib.php on line 3010

Also have attached a screen shot of the graphical report i'm getting at the moment.

-Ira


Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Monday, 19 March 2012, 10:02 PM
 

See attached screenshot of same feedback activity but from Analysis screen


Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Monday, 19 March 2012, 10:48 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira,

That's useful, thank you. It looks like the report is generating okay, but something is going wrong with that particular question type (since the text ones are being aggregated correctly, but the bar graphs aren't appearing at all.

The easiest thing to debug that would be to get a copy of some of the database tables that start with 'mdl_report_builder_fbq_' but I know that access is a bit of an issue so first I'll see if I can manage to reproduce it on my system without that.

If you could confirm the 'item type' of the feedback question that's not showing (the text in the pulldown box when you create the question), your database type (postgres I think?) and the totara version you're on I'll see what I can do.

Thanks,

Simon

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Tuesday, 20 March 2012, 3:41 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira,

I've managed to reproduce this bug on my system - it looks like the feedback module was upgraded to the most recent version back in December, and part of that upgrade modified the way questions were defined.

I'm going to have to spend a bit of time figuring out what has changed and updating the report builder code to match. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

Simon

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Sunday, 25 March 2012, 3:15 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira,

I've got a patch that fixes this issue now, do you want me to send you a patch file or can you wait until the next release (next week)?

Simon

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Sunday, 25 March 2012, 3:18 PM
Group Totara

I should add that the fix I've done gets the multichoice and multichoicerated questions working, it doesn't add the information question type as that was never supported by the original code.

Simon

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Sunday, 25 March 2012, 6:15 PM
 

that's fine, the information question type can be represented by other columns in the custom reporting.

-Ira

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Sunday, 25 March 2012, 6:14 PM
 

Hi Simon,

Can you please send me through the patch as our live prod server won't be upgraded for a number of weeks.

Thanks,

-Ira

Simon Coggins
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Simon Coggins - Sunday, 25 March 2012, 6:25 PM
Group Totara

Okay, I'll post it here as soon as it gets through our testing process.

Simon

Ciaran Irvine (Core Developer)
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ciaran Irvine (Core Developer) - Monday, 2 April 2012, 8:55 PM
 

Hi folks,

I'm pleased to report that a fix for this issue is included in today's (3rd April 2012) release of version 1.0.35 and 1.1.14.

Patch file attached as requested.

Ciaran
Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Monday, 20 May 2013, 7:48 PM
 

Hi,

Has this patch/funcitonality also been applied for the same Feedback Submissions Graphical custom reports in Totara v2.2 as well?

I'm noticiing the same issues on some client 2.2 sites...

-Ira

me
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by George Angus - Monday, 20 May 2013, 9:08 PM
Group Totara

Hi Ira,

There is a patch one comment up - that should work, and the bug is being looked at now.

regards,

George.

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Sunday, 26 May 2013, 4:34 PM
 

Hi George,

Isn't that patch only for Totara versions 1.0 & 1.0? Will it work also for a Totara 2.2 site?

Thanks,

-Ira

Daniel Bush
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Daniel Bush - Sunday, 26 May 2013, 6:50 PM
 

Hi Simon / Ira,

Ira and I were coming up against this issue for a client using totara 2.2.14 which I think Ira has already mentioned.

I could have a go at trying to apply the patch and test it.  The locations have changed significantly between 1 and 2 (location of reportbuilder and line numbers in files), so I'm not sure I can patch this into the code using a tool.  I have to do it manually.

(The patch would be commit 7b3e3698fbaf7796e1fe2bbf1e6deeeb4c44be29 which was released with 1.1.14)

There are some bits in the code relating to the type separator which I'm not sure about because I'm not familiar with this part of the system.

Anyway, I might try to do this for the client.  If this is of interest, I'm happy to contribute this to the 2.2 and 2.4 branches and have it reviewed?

 

Regards,

Daniel

Yuliya Bozhko
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Yuliya Bozhko - Sunday, 26 May 2013, 7:03 PM
 

Hi Daniel,

There is a patch in review for Totara 2.2 that was ported from Totara 1.1. It should be availabel in the next 2.2 release. However, it cannot be applied to Totara 2.4 as feedback depends on activity groups which have been removed from Totara 2.4.

Yuliya

Daniel Bush
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Daniel Bush - Sunday, 26 May 2013, 9:51 PM
 

Hi Yuliya,

Thanks for that info.

Is that patch on a branch, I'd like to see it? (trying to look for it in t2-release-2.2)

 

Regards,

Daniel

Yuliya Bozhko
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Yuliya Bozhko - Monday, 27 May 2013, 1:59 PM
 

It hasn't been released yet. It is in our review repository right now.

Yuliya

Ira Felinski
Re: Graphs and other choice information displayed in Feedback Responses reports
by Ira Felinski - Tuesday, 20 March 2012, 10:43 PM
 

Hi Simon,

We are using PostgreSQL 8.4 as our database.

The question types that are NOT generating responses in the custom reports are:

  • Information (for non anonymous questionaires)
  • Multiple choice - single answer
  • Multiple choice - multiple answers
Database tables (from our off network dev/testing server) are attached 
thanks,
-Ira