Best practice forum (Archived)

Totara User Field definition

Hi there,

I have some questions about the definition and the use of some user database field.

We have to check if our customer can deliver the fields from there LDAP.

First the Customer want to use there "Fully Quality Domain name" from there "Active Directory". Which field could be the best for this case?

Then, can somebody explain me the difference between institution and department?

We want to use Position-name and Primary Position, but our customer has three fields. One with the organisational title, one with the hierarchical title and one with a not reversible conjunction of the first fields.

Is it Possible to use all three field and if possible to select possible course members by the field entries?

Thanks for your help and best regards.

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All the "optional" user profile fields, such as Institution and Department, are just extra data stored with user accounts which can be shown in reports etc. but are not linked to anything meaningful in the rest of the database. None of them are needed and all can be used in whatever way makes sense to you and your organisation. You could store FQDN in any of those fields which is not used for anything else, and probably rename it.

I would guess it shouldn't be too hard for a developer to add the extra position field to Totara Sync fields. And may be worth a feature request for adding this and other profile fields (including custom fields) - I think there are a couple of recent forum posts asking about inclusion of other fields.

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Hi Alan

It is possible to include custom user profile fields in Totara sync - see the demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpBXMrfKb70&feature=youtu.be to see this and other features of Totara sync.

Around the 20 minute mark there is a demo of including adding a custom profile field.

Craig

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Hi Tobias

In answer to your other questions - the fields institution and department come from the standard profile fields in Moodle. You can store any values you like in here but originally they were designed to store information about an educational organisation - institution could mean school name - eg School of Business and Department could be Economics.

As well as a position hierarchy there is an organisation hierarchy that can be used to store organisation information rather than position information.

The selection of course members can be done through defining of dynamic audiences based on field values see http://help.totaralms.com/audiences.htm if you are using Totara 1.1 then cohorts are used in a similar way http://help.totaralms.com/totara_v1.1_help/Cohorts.htm

regards

Craig

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