Totara Learn Open Discussions

Manage 'ad hoc' seminar rooms

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Hi there,

like (no doubt) many here, there has been an explosion of ad hoc seminar rooms in one of my client-partner's sites.

We've looked at the 'Manage Rooms' report and can see "Actions" to do some management (including 'deleting') "Site wide" rooms, but there do not appear to be the same actions available for non-site-wide (ad hoc) rooms.

I expect that this is because only the creator of the room has the power to delete it.

Of course, this has led to a plethora of rooms with the 'same name' (e.g. 'boronia' - with different capitalisations) and no 'easy' way to manage these.

I am thinking of suggesting that the capability to create ad hoc rooms (I believe it's "mod/facetoface:manageadhocrooms") may need to be removed and a more controlled process put in place. And then of course, they have a long, hard slog to delete all the ad hoc rooms.

But before I make that suggestion, I thought I'd ask here for direction :)

harry

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Kia ora Harry,

Yes, I tried not long I started to try and tidy up the rooms on our site but found it impossible.

There is this semi-related enhancement but doesn't look like much has happened with it.

Suggest Totara Learn features - TL-19127 - Improve control of room creation

Larry

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We're hitting up against this issue as well. We've restricted permission to create ad-hoc rooms (after tons got wrongly created), but there doesn't appear to be a mechanism to delete those ad-hoc rooms (even if it's not associated with an event, even if the person trying to do the deleting is the person who created the room, and in the context where they created it). Should there be some sort of clean up process running via cron which removes these now unneeded ad-hoc rooms?

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Hi,

Just stumbled on this issue today and found we have over 1500 ad hoc rooms completely took my eyes off this one. I have found a way to delete the ad hoc rooms though it is a bit long winded. I've found that if you go to all the sessions with the rogue ad hoc room and assign a sitewide room this then removes it from the list you can then go through all the sessions and delete the sitewide room which will then allow you to delete it from the rooms list. Long winded but works, i'm going to see if i can write a script to process these.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,

Naif

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Kia ora Naif,

I'll just add some amendments:

1 - if there are multiple instances of the room there should still be a master version at site level. So if you do delete the other versions, you should add the master version back to the event so there's a history of where it took place rather than a blank.

If you find yourself very lucky and the ad hoc room is the only version of the room created then changing it to a site wide room is all you'll have to do.

2 - if an ad hoc room has been created at course level but not assigned to an event in that course it will be nearly impossible to find so you can edit it to assign it as a site wide room. Unless there's a hint in the name as to what course it was created for and the only other way I can think of finding it would be to stumble across it while creating an event on that course.

Ngā mihi,

Larry

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That's really useful, thanks. I've found if you add Room ID to the embedded report (and whatever custom report you're using to find which rooms are associated with which sessions), that makes it a lot easier to differentiate between different rooms with the same name.

What I think is still missing from Totara is the ability to delete ad-hoc rooms which are no longer associated with a session, but which weren't turned into site-wide rooms first (so there's no way to delete them from the overall room list).

Also wouldn't mind a tool to bulk update rooms (so all of the ad-hoc ones can be swapped for the "master" one), but I appreciate there might be a step too far.

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Interesting point about the room ID, I didn't know about that report field.

It still won't help find a room if it hasn't been associated with a session though.

If a room isn't associated with a session, would you not associate it with one, mark it as site wide, remove it from the session and go and delete it?

Total agree about a bulk update option, but also agree it won't be happening.

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Ideally, you would need associate the room with a session, make it site-wide and then delete it, but unfortunately I can't seem to find a way to work out which course the room exists in (because the "Seminar Sessions" report won't have any record of it if there are no associated sessions), so I'm a bit stuck on that front. Maybe "Context" should be one of the bits of information available when you view room information, so it can either say "Site-wide" or give a link to the course in which the room is defined. Would actually be quite useful having that as an available column in the Seminar Rooms report source as well.

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