Best practice forum (Archived)

Deleting Glossary

Hopefully I've just missed a really obvious answer to this, but I've searched and I can't seem to find a solution. I've created a course, and one of the resources in it is a glossary. My problem is that I have now created a second glossary due to having wrongly imported items into the first one, but I can't actually remove the old glossary from the course. As I say, I'm sure it's obvious, but there are no options to delete a glossary on the "Glossaries" page and therefore I can't get rid of it.

Also, and this may be a slightly picky thing, but it would be useful to be able to mass-delete items from a glossary rather than doing it one item at a time, and to link to an existing glossary from within the course rather than only being able to create a new one each time.

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Hi Dan,

That should just be a matter of opening the course in which your glossary sits, turn editing on and click the delete (red X) icon next to it.

AFAIK - it is a case of deleting entries one by one, or delete the whole glossary and contained terms.

You can share terms between glossaries if you wish. When setting up your glossary, under 'Glossary type' you can select Main. You can then create another glossary, which will then by default be glossary type: Secondary (as you can only have one Main glossary in each course). The you can export terms from Secondary into Main.

After you add a term to the Secondary glossary, when you view the glossary list you will also see a red plus symbol, an option to click to export to the Main glossary.

Hope that helps.

Andy

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That's what I would have assumed, but when I open the course (as an admin), turn on editing and go to the list of glossaries, there are no red X icons next to the list (see attached).

I can of course hide the second glossary from users so they don't see it, but it does bug me a little that it's still there.

Creating a secondary glossary and importing all of the entries from the main one seems like a reasonable work-around, but isn't quite the same as being able to simply re-link to the main glossary which would seem to make more sense!

The question about mass deleting entries was more about being able to clear a glossary out and then re-import from the XML file I created, although of course if I could delete a glossary I could just do it that way!

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Hi Dan

Can you go on to the course home page (click the INF1 link) with editing turned on and the X and other symbols should appear providing you have the correct rights.

Craig

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Hi Dan,

I hope Craig's screenshot helps to clarify; open up the course page rather than coursename > glossaries. Then you can delete a glossary and also of course by doing so, mass delete entries.

Entries can elso be exported from a glossary en masse, and when 2.2. is launched, exported to portfolios also.

For more info on glossaries see

http://help.totaralms.com/Trainer/Glossary.htm

and

http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Glossary_module for 2.2

Thanks,

Andy

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Thanks, and that works beautifully if the glossary is still being used in one of the sections of the course, but as you can see in the screenshot above the glossary to be deleted isn't being used and therefore won't appear anywhere on the course page. Or is it somewhere that I'm missing? Is there a block which needs to be turned on to show me the list of all glossaries (or objects more generally) contained within the course?

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Could you elaborate Dan? You would normally create the Glossary as an activity in a course. If you want to delete it, click the x in the course entry and it should be gone?

The breadcrumb trail in your earlier screenshot shows the place where you could see a list of glossaries for that particular course.

You could also include an Activities Block in your course, to list activities by type; forums, glossaries, resources and so on. Turn editing on - Blocks - Add activities block.

Cheers,

Andy

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Certainly, if I create a new glossary, it appears in the list, and when you delete it in the course entry it disappears again. The problem, it seems, is that if I use the Import Entries feature and select the destination as "New Glossary", there is no way to either link to that new glossary as a course activity or delete it once created.

The activities block shows the list of types of activity (glossary, SCORM, etc) but not the individual activities themselves.

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Hi Dan

This is a problem as you describe it - to get around this problem create a new glossary in the course and then use the import glossary rather than selecting the destination as New glossary when importing entries.

This should get you a glossary that appears on the course list and can be deleted.

Craig

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Might it be worth removing the option to import as a new glossary if it's going to cause these problems?

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Hi Dan

Yes I agree this shouldn't be an option if it doesn't work

I had a look in Moodle bug tracker to see if this has been reported as a bug and fixed but couldn't find this. I will check and see if this works oK in the Totara 2.2.

Craig

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It appears that I spoke a little too soon about this issue. As you can see below, when a glossary is created which isn't used in any section, it appears at the top of the course, and can be deleted from there. More of a bug than a feature I suspect, but it does at least provide a workaround!

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