Best practice forum (Archived)

Searching Course by custom field

Is it possible to find a course by a value in a course custom field?

I have tried this, but there were no results.

Or is it possible to find a course by a given tag?

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Hi Tobias,

This is possible in a suitable report - how exactly are you looking?

regards,

George,.

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Hi Guys,

This functionality isnt available at the moment, however you may find this useful:

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/tutorial_moodle.html

regards,

George.

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Hi Tobias,

There are a couple of options that you might find useful.

You could look at the Moodle tagging functionality, also, you could try adding 'pseudo-tags' within the course summary field as the find functionality searches 'Course Name' and 'Course Summary'.

You could add something like;

'Keywords: Health & Safety, eLearning, lifting...'

at the end of each course summary and the results will be presented in the search results.

Tony

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I'm trying the same thing I think as Tobias. We're on Totara v2.4. We're trying to use 'Official tags' to identify courses from an external software provider. We want to be able to go to 'Find Courses' and enter the tag name in the search field and get a list of all courses from that provider. My understanding of the tag function from the help website was that it should allow this. Here is their text. "Tags are
keywords which can be used to categorise courses and content to help users find them during a search."

In our course default settings we have "Course tagging" ticked to allow tagging. We've defined our tag in the master list via Site Admin > Appearance > Manage tags and it appears to have saved as it appears correctly when we re-enter the list; and it says it is used in ten courses. We've gone to "Edit course settings" and highlighted the required tag, then clicked save.

When we then search for that keyword, nothing comes up. Any ideas? I need the functionality to work via search, not reporting.

Thanks everyone.

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Hi Fiona,

If you add the Tags block you can click on the tak you require and it will bring up the tagged courses. Is this what you need?

regards,

George.

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Hi Fiona,

Unfortunately that appears to be an error on the help site - there does not currently appear to be any code that would include tags in the normal user search.

I will file an enhancement ticket to add that functionality. In the mean time George's suggestion appears to be the only way to get a list of courses that have a particular tag.

Simon

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Thanks everyone. Looks like lots of options for us to help our learners.

Looking forward to the functionality being added. Simon, would you see this enhancement as being added in the next maintenance release or would you see it in the next version?

In the meantime the tags are already loaded and I can report on them using report builder so the key thing to address is searching for our learners. I'll check out the course field option.

Thanks all. Much appreciated.

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Hi Fiona,

It's a bit difficult to give a timeframe as it depends on how much time we have between bug reports to work on features. Probably we won't get to it for a while though so if you're able to use custom fields that would probably be the way to go.

Simon

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Hi, related to this, I have some issues with custom fields on courses;

1) I can't find custom field content when searching in Courses (tried on Text Input and Menu of Choices).
2) In the help documentation, I've understood it as it should be possible to set custom fields visibility, so that it should be possible for learners to view custom field content "on the registration or signup page" - however I can't find that setting (the only setting that reminds of that is "Hide on the settings page"), neither can I find any page where custom field content would be displayed for learners.
3) In version 2.5.0, can't edit, delete or move custom fields (just reported a bug for that).

Rickard

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Repy to self; regarding point 3 in my post above - editing/deleting/moving custom fields is again fully functional in 2.5.1, thanks!

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Regarding 1, from a quick look at the code my understanding is that course custom fields aren't included in the search either, although Amir is saying "The search works well on course custom fields content in my experience" which would contradict that - unless he's talking about report builder filters on the 'Courses' report source? I will expand the enhancement ticket to include custom fields as well as tags.

Regarding 2, I think that's referring to user profile custom fields, not course custom fields. User profile fields have the "Display on signup page" option.

Simon

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