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Suggest Totara Learn features
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Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
I'd like to +1 this request.
Also it seems completly pointless hiding courses from people but leaving an empty category which learners can then infer the types of courses that are on the system that they are not allowed access to. I would have assumed that if the category doesn't contain any courses that I can see, then I wouldn't see the category.
David
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Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
Hi!
Think this is a very good request! +1 as well.
- Jani -
Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
+1
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Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
Thanks everyone for all the feedback on this.
There's actually 2 things being discussed here:
1. Hiding categories for users when the category doesn't contain any courses visible to them
I agree that we should do this. The only exception should be site admins or users with the manage category/add courses capability (who need to see empty categories to be able to add courses in them). I would class this as a bug so I will open a ticket for resolving this in a 2.5 point release.
2. Ability to set the visibility of a whole category in one go
This would be classed as a new feature. The difficulty here is that it introduces some ambiguities:
* If a course is hidden, but it's parent category is visible (or vice versa) what happens?
* If a category is hidden, but it's parent category is visible (or vice versa) what happens?
The most intuitive solution is to apply the most strict rules, so a course is hidden if it is hidden, or it's category is hidden, or it's category's parent category is hidden.
However this is much more difficult from a performance perspective, because the state of a particular course is dependent on the state of all parent categories. This logic would have to be added on top of the existing logic which is already quite complex. The current logic is as follows:
if (audience visibility enabled) {
if ($item->audiencevisible == ALL) {
// show item
} else if (user_has_manageaudiencevisibility_capability()) {
// show item
} else if (user_is_enrolled_in_course()) {
// show item
} else if (user_viewing_is_in_any_audience_with_this_as_visible_learning($item)) {
// show item
} else {
// hide item
}
} else {
// normal moodle behaviour
if ($item->visible) {
// show item
} else if (has_capability('moodle/course:viewhiddencourses', $itemcontext)) {
// show item dimmed
} else {
// don't show item
}
}
In theory this would be doable, because the data could be retrieved from the database then manipulated in code afterwards, however in order to allow audience visibility to be applied on top of other existing queries (such as in report builder), it is necessary for us to be able to calculate it via a single database query.
The logic required to check all parent states makes this quite a challenging requirement, both in terms of extending the existing query and also ensuring it performs well on large sites. Essentially you would need all the logic above for each parent category as well as the course itself.
Unless we can come up with a simpler way to apply calculate the state of a course with category level visibility I'm afraid I can't see a way for us to practically implement this.
Simon
Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
When creating an audience there is a Context field that allows the selection of the course category .Is it possible that this value could be used for helping decide audience visibility.
I can't see what this context field does as changing this doesn't seem to affect the selection of enrolled or visible learning outside the selected context but assume it has some function.
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Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
Audiences in Totara are actually what are called "Cohorts" in Moodle. We have extended them to add the dynamic functionality (in moodle cohorts are manually assigned.
In moodle it is possible to create a cohort either at the site level or in a category context. If a cohort is created in a category context it only appears under that category. See here:
http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Cohorts#Managing_category_cohorts
One other thing we changed was the cohort list page, and it looks like when we made that change we forgot to filter the list by context, so in Totara currently all cohorts are shown on both the system list (Site Admin > Users > Accounts > Audiences) and on the individual category lists (Go to category then click Admin > [Category Name] > Audiences).
That's a bug and I'll file a ticket.
Hope that clears it up.
Simon
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Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
Hi Sam,
It is going through testing right now, as long as there are no issues found it should be in next Tuesday's release of 2.5.10 (18th March). If it doesn't make that for some reason it will be out 2 weeks later, but we could provide a patch file that you could apply in that case.
Simon
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Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
A fix for the cohort context issue was included in today's (18 March 2014) release of Totara 2.5.10
Re: Feature request: Ability to use Audiences to control visibility of course categories.
A fix for hiding the empty categories issue was included in today's (18 March 2014) release of Totara 2.5.10
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