Best practice forum (Archived)

Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17

 
James Marshall
Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by James Marshall - Wednesday, 22 August 2012, 1:51 AM
 

We have a client who makes extensive use of program management.

They are experiencing the following issues.

  • When they assign a program to an organisation it assigns the program to everyone but randomly does not place an alert of the learner dashboard.
    I have checked this extensivley and there is no pattern to it.

    Could you supply the logic on how the alerts are assigned?
     
  • When the alert (email) is sent it comes from the users assigned manager. They see this as spoofing as the LMS server is a hosted solution not linked to there main email server. Is there a way to override this settings so the alert just comes from a generic email address. We did overide this in the code but not keen in hacking this as makes upgrading a problem.
     
  • Also once the alert is placed on the dashboard when is it removed?
    Only alert the user dismisses it?
Many Thanks for your help on this.
For issues like this should we get the client to go through the support portal direct?
Simon Coggins
Re: Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by Simon Coggins - Thursday, 23 August 2012, 11:36 PM
Group Totara

Hi James,

For the first point, are you saying that some users receive alerts but others don't? That does seem strange. Are you seeing any errors in your server error log, or if you make an assignment then manually run the cron via [site]/admin/cron.php?

There isn't currently a way to override the sender via the interface. I would agree that if signing up to a program, it doesn't really make sense for the email to come from their manager though (in other cases, such as comments on a plan it is more sensible). We'll look at updating the code as you suggest.

There is a setting in the code that determines how long alerts are kept before they are dismissed - currently its set to 30 days but you can change it in totara/message/cron.php (in 2.2) or local/totara_msg/cron.php in (1.0 or 1.1).

For issues like this the community site is good as sometimes the answers can help others too. If you have an issue that you want to discuss privately then you might prefer direct communication via the support site.

Simon

James Marshall
Re: Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by James Marshall - Monday, 27 August 2012, 9:14 AM
 

Hi Simon,

Thanks for getting back to me.

For the first point, are you saying that some users receive alerts but others don't?

Yes thats right, its very random, the number of users we are assigning programs too are around 200 in size (we are using the assign by organization) some of the 200 get the alert (via email and placed on dashboard) other will get the required learning tab but no alert on the dashboard. Its really starting to undermine confidence in this area.

Check the cron and server logs and there is nothing strange. 

Do you know of any bugs to this part of the system that could be consistent with above?

Simon Coggins
Re: Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by Simon Coggins - Monday, 27 August 2012, 5:12 PM
Group Totara

Hi James,

Very strange. You might want to try upgrading to the latest 1.1 release as there have been fixes to program management since 1.1.14, but I can't think of any bugs we've fixed recently that have that particular symptom.

Without any specific errors it's quite difficult to diagnose though - I think the only way forward is if you can send us a copy of the database and tell us an example of a program that is showing this issue.

We could then look in the database tables and see if we can see what's going on.

Do you have an account at support.totaralms.com? If so you can open a ticket and securely upload files to it.

Simon

James Marshall
Re: Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by James Marshall - Monday, 27 August 2012, 9:20 AM
 

Sorry I reported Moodle version initially, the Totara version is:

Version 1.1.14 (Build: 20120403.0)

James Marshall
Re: Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by James Marshall - Monday, 27 August 2012, 1:53 PM
 

Hi Simon,

What would be good to know is exactly what the program crons do and when they run, our cron is setup to run every few mins but I noticed an echo on the cron page stating the hourly cron recently run no need to run.

Simon Coggins
Re: Issues with Program Management on Totara 1.9.17
by Simon Coggins - Monday, 27 August 2012, 5:17 PM
Group Totara

The program cron is in local/program/cron.php.

Some resource intensive activities only run hourly or daily but that restriction can be changed by modifying these lines:

$hourlycron = 60 * 60; // one hour
$dailycron = 60 * 60 * 24; // one day

if you set them to zero the cron will run every time.

However, I don't think this would be the cause of your problems, because some messages are being sent - it seems more likely that an error is occuring part way through the sending, so some users get their messages but others don't.

Not sure why no errors are showing up though - do you have debugging turned on?

Simon