Best practice forum (Archived) - Automatic Notifications on 2.5

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Automatic Notifications on 2.5

Hi,

Hoping someone can help - we have recently upgraded to v2.5 of Totara to make use of certifications however we are having a couple of problems with the setup of automatic notifications -

We would like the address on the notification to be the system address as opposed to the person who performed the task. I have added the address to Site Administration - Plugins - Activity Modules - Face to Face - Sender Address but this has not worked?
When the learner received a notification and open the iCal attachment the 'Accept', 'Tentative' & 'Decline'... buttons are all greyed out so the learner cannot click to insert into their Outlook acct?

Can anyone offer any help?

Thanks

Steph

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I would definitely agree with the first point, booking myself onto a session and the email coming from...me is very odd indeed. I too have set a generic email address for messages to come from (which can be checked centrally if anyone relies, etc.) so using the email address of the person performing the action doesn't make a lot of sense.

On the second point, my Accept, Tentative and Decline buttons work fine, as the email arrives in my inbox it goes into my calendar as tentitive as other meeting requests from other sources do.

Sorry if that's not a whole load of help, but thought another data point might be useful.

Regards

Dan

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Hi Steph,

On your first point there is some discussion here:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17537#p12629

The Sender address is only used when Cron triggers a notification.

Please accept my apologies for the delay in getting back to you over the Outlook issue. One of our devs is lloking into this now. Can you send me a copy of the email? Is this issue happening with other icals from other systems? Does it happen with multi-day f2f sessions?

regards,

George.

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Hi George,

Please find attached screenshots of both the confirmatory email and also the iCal appt. Interestingly this email now doesn't display all the buttons and gives the impression it needs removing from the diary as opposed to adding.

On the note of email notification address, I've checked the Sender address on the system and it is set correctly. Reading other posts it would appear that our system is behaving normally is there any way we can change this as we want all notifications to go from one address.

Many thanks - Steph

iCal demo file.doc

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Hi George,

Sorry while I have you another quick question. We want the email notification to display the Course name as opposed to the Face to Face activity name and I've been experimenting but can't get it to work. What do I have to type [?] to get it to work.

Thanks again - Steph

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Hi Steph,

This is a bug and Ive filed a bug report.

regards,

George.

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Hi George,

Thanks - but I've got myself a bit confused with the whole string here, which is the bug?

Steph

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Hey Steph,

I think the bug here is the mismatch between the label "coursename" and the variable "facetofacename". At least I hope so since we included a patch in yesterdays release of 2.5.3 which added the new variable coursename and attempted to fix as many occurrences of this as possible in an upgrade. If you upgrade to 2.5.3

coursename: [facetofacename]

should be replaced by
coursename: [coursename]
facetoface: [facetofacename]

In your facetoface notifications. Though it is possible that some have been missed if customisations have been made so it is worth going through a few of them just to make sure.

Cheers,
David

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Hi Steph,

Can you forward the actual emails? Thanks.

We are taking steps to resove the f2f emailling issue as per here:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=18983

In the short-term you can edit the code to make emails come from the support addr:

/mod/facetoface/notification/lib.php:
499 $tempuser = generate_email_supportuser();
500 $tempuser->email = get_config(NULL, 'facetoface_fromaddress');
501 $newevent->userfrom = $tempuser;

This will send from the facetoface email address, it will use the name from the support email.

regards,

George.

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Hey,

Just a quick update on the code given above. If you don't want to be using the support users name, and you are on 2.5.0+, you can use this instead:

499 $tempuser = totara_generate_email_user(get_config(NULL, 'facetoface_fromaddress'));
500 $newevent->userfrom = $tempuser;

and the name will just be the same as the facetoface email address.

Cheers,
David

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Hi David/everyone, We tried adding those 2 rows of code, but it hasn't solved our problem. Can I first check that we have the same understanding of what it should do? We have a centralised administration team for one of your clients. A member of staff may phone that team and say "please book me on a F2F session". So booking administrator does this. The staff member then currently gets an automated email - this email has the email address of the booking administrator in its "From" field, whereas we thought the code changes should mean that the email would come from the email address that appears in Admin...plugins...activities....facetoface "sender address". We're on 2.5.1. Thanks! Tim

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Hey Tim,

Yes I think we have the same understanding, these changes should make all facetoface messages send from the configurable facetoface sender email address. What were your exact changes, you added these two lines to /mod/facetoface/notifications/lib.php?

499 $tempuser = totara_generate_email_user(get_config(NULL, 'facetoface_fromaddress'));
500 $newevent->userfrom = $tempuser;

Did you perhaps leave in the original userfrom statement below that?

501 $newevent->userfrom = $USER;

If so, that is over riding the change you made and removing it should get it working again. If not, this is rather strange. I just re-tested the fix and it and it worked as expected. What behaviour are you seeing after making the changes, are all the messages still sending from the user that signed up the learner?

Cheers,
David

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Ahh I suspect we didn't remove 501. Thanks - I'll check and let you know if ongoing problems.

T

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Hi Geroge,

Sorry, I'm a very new forum user! What address would you like me to forward to emails to?

Steph

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I've read the thread you have linked to, but I will reply here to keep things together and avoid resurrecting an old thread.

I'm not entirely sure I agree that the email coming from the person performing the action is the best approach for system-generated emails, but for others it may make perfect sense. In particular, since the system is effectively using a "from" which disagrees with the SPF record, email systems should legitimately be marking every email as spam. I would have thought, if there is a default email set, that every email should then come from that address for Face-to-Face notifications, or at the very least it should be possible to enable that behaviour in the settings for the Face-to-Face plugin. I can appreciate that some organisations may want the emails to appear to be from the individual performing the action, but I know our System Administrators can't whitelist all email from the email server on our Totara server where as they can whitelist our generic "noreply@ourdomain.net" address.

Dan

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Hi Dan,

See the reply to Steph.

regards,

George.

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We have the same issue over here at East Lancashire Hospitals and urgent attention to this will be very much appreciated.

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Hi Raisa,

Could you supply more details?

many thanks,

George.

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Hi folks,

On further investigation I've uncovered problems with the iCals which were introduced in 2.4, I have patches for 2.4 and 2.5 currently in testing and will update this thread when the patch is ready for release.

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Hey,

Just to let you know that Ciaran's patch was included in yesterdays release of Totara 2.5.3 and has been merged in ready for the next 2.4 release Totara 2.4.15 which should be released next Tuesday the 17th of December.

Cheers,
David

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