Best practice forum (Archived)

T-13737 Added message body after manager prefix in Facetoface notifications

With respect to T-13737 (Added message body after manager prefix in Facetoface notifications), does this mean that the behaviour of notifications has now changed so that the emails sent to managers will include the prefix and then a copy of the learner's email? If so, that's great (because the feature now behaves as expected, with the "prefix" actually being a prefix), but also a bit of an issue because we've got A LOT of face to face activities where we've set up the notifications based on the previous (incorrect) behaviour. Would it be possible to give a configuration option to determine how this behaves, or is everyone going to have to go through and change their notifications?

Thanks

Dan

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Hi Dan,

Its very unlikely we will be implementing a configuration option for the behaviour you are suggesting, we have to focus on going forward with bug fixes & its not a feature request we are in a position to devote a great deal of resource to at present.

regards,

George.

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And to clarify, was I correct in my thinking that the behaviour which has existed for some time was a bug, and therefore every Face to Face message with the "Send a copy of this notification to the user's manager" box ticked will need to be updated? It's not a small job, but we would obviously have to complete it before updating because otherwise the messages going out would contain two copies of all of the required information.

Totally appreciate that you're fixing a lot of bugs, and that is very important, but if the bug you're fixing is a long standing one (and I think I'm right in saying the behaviour of manager messages has been the same for quite a long time) and changes the existing behaviour, it will have an impact on established users. If nothing else, I wanted to make sure that larger sites than ours (who might have hundreds or even thousands of Face to Face activities with possibly 15 or 20 notifications each) understood the implications of installing this update.

If this is something which it's more appropriate for our Totara partner to be raising directly with you, I'm happy to use that route instead, but I think other users might appreciate some clarity on the implications of this bug fix.

Regards

Dan

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Hi Dan,

We appreciate that you are experiencing issues with this patch, but it may best if you discuss with your partner a way to withholding it until you are ready.

This is the description of the bug behaviour:

"When a notification is set to "Send a copy of this notification to the user's manager", the Manager copy prefix should be followed by the user's message, but it isn't."

Testing:

"1. Create two users.
2. Set user1 to have manager user2.
3. Create a course and allow self-enrolement.
4. Add a face-to-face.
5. Add a session.
6. Login as user1.
8. Enrol on the course and sign-up for the face-to-face session.
7. Check that the manager copy of the email you receive contains the body of the message (the same content that the learner receives). Without the patch, it just contains the prefix."

We felt we were obliged to fix this to the correct behaviour when it was reported, as the actual behaviour was unambiguously incorrect.

regards,

George.

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For a new user of the system, the way it now works is exactly as one would expect, can't fault you on fixing it because you're right that it was unambiguously incorrect. I do wonder if it might have been simpler to rename the two items "Learner Copy" and "Manager Copy" given the large number of existing Face to Face sessions, but obviously that's up to you guys.

Will talk to our Totara partner about installing everything except this patch, don't want to leave our system exposed to security bugs but it's going to take a long time to rewrite all of the customised notifications we currently have.

Thanks for your help

Dan

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Hey Dan.

Can I suggest that instead of messing around trying to exclude only this patch, you go ahead and install the whole release and then change the messages, taking however long it takes. If any messages go out to managers between the time of the upgrade and the time that the message is changed then, at worst, the manager will get a message containing two copies of the information, contained inside a single email. If it was the other way around, that there was missing info during this period, then I would understand that you would definitely want to prevent it from happening (and we'd help to make sure it didn't), but if everyone is receiving all the information they need then I can't imagine how anyone could become upset.

Nathan

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