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Re: Feedback activity reports
Hi Amir,
Just to give you some background this feature was originally developed a long time ago for one specific client, and ended up in Totara. Unfortunately it hasn't really been maintained in Totara - the functionality is very specific to one use case and I'm not sure it can be generalised to work in a more general, easy to support way. It seems that probably it has been broken since the port to 2.2 (due to changes to the feedback module) and you are just the first person to notice!
Since it will require quite a bit of work to fix and maintain, and it isn't really a good candidate for a core feature we are going to remove it from 2.4. Of course you are still welcome to do as you wish with the code if it is useful for you.
To answer some of your questions, the way it was supposed to work is as follows:
- Create official tags
- Create feedback activities with identical questions across multiple courses
- Tag a set of identical feedback activities with the same tag.
- Create an activitiy group based on the tag. Choose one feedback activity as the "reference/base" activity
- Once a group is created, within report builder some new sources should appear (2 or 3 for each group)
- Report sources should aggregate data from across the feedback activities within the group
Simon
Re: Feedback activity reports
Hi Simon and Amir
We're the customer/user case of this functionality and are *very* attached to it.
We are planning on upgrading our site from 1.1 to 2.4 starting shortly and deploying around October/November. Our expectation is that this type of functionality will be available to us in 2.4. We currently carry several hundreds of customisations not in core and I would imagine that we'll apply the logic of past upgrades - if its too expensive (or carries too much risk) we'll seek alternative approaches to achieve the same functionality from the user perspective.
Originally, we went down this route as we had the expectations of visual reporting, grouping report sources and generating a wider interest in a consistent site-wide Level 1 Evaluation process. None of which has happened :(
Happy to consider a better architectural approach to this in 2.4 - if that helps?
Cheers
Austen
Re: Feedback activity reports
I can confirm that its quite broken in Totara 2.4 - a most unwelcome discovery post-upgrade from 1.1.
Attached is a sample of the Feedback report a trainer saw of only their own Level 1 evaluation across multiple courses where there were also many other trainers delivering sessions.
Re: Feedback activity reports
Hi Austen,
Removing existing functionality is obviously something that we don't do lightly, unfortunately in this case I'm afraid it's necessary.
This functionality really consists of two parts:
1. The ability to select groups of feedbacks and aggregate the data into a new database table.
2. The ability to produce reports that summarize that data.
When this was originally developed we made the decision to build both parts of this functionality on top of report builder, which I now believe (with hindsight) was the wrong choice.
The first part was implemented as "Activity groups" which made use of tagging and then Report builder "Preprocessor" to allow the report source to generate the tables it needs. Although this was written in a general way to make it reusable in other cases, in practice this hasn't happened, and in fact changes to the internal structure of the feedback module in subsequent versions has caused the existing functionality to break in later releases.
The second part makes use of report builder to generate the query, but all of the display of the report is done using some custom code that again is specific to this case. That means that the report builder code is littered with lots of extra code to handle this special case.
Although we are still planning on adding graphical reporting functionality to report builder (hopefully in 2.6!), it is likely to be limited to producing a single graph at a time - the complexity of the requirements of your feedback report (individual per-question graphs, question level aggregation and custom formatting) make it unlikely that it will be possible to do in a generic way.
Given we have limited development resources we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about where to focus our efforts and in this case it's hard to justify the ongoing maintenance of a feature that's essentially unused by anyone but yourselves (the code started giving fatal errors in the 2.2 release but no-one noticed and we removed the menu item entirely in 2.4).
Now that you are moving onto 2.4 I think there are a couple of options available:
1. Take the existing code and continue to maintain it as a customisation. This would include getting it working with the new feedback module data structure and also updating to handle any changes to report builder.
2. Reworking the functionality to remove the dependency on report builder. This would probably greatly simplify the code and make it easier to maintain going forward.
I realise this is not ideal for you as you seek to reduce the amount of custom code in your installation, but I can't see another path that would provide a general purpose solution for Totara that would also meet this quite specific need.
Simon