Non-core contributed modules

Hebrew translation of latest version (should be placed inside lang/he_utf8)

Thanks Nadav, that's great!

I've noticed several mistakes in the spanish translation. I would be more than happy to correct them, what viewer do you recommend in working with php?

Thanks Kent, you can edit the language files from within Moodle itself in the Site Admin block > Language > Language Editing etc. Or if you want to edit the PHP you could use almost any text editor. I prefer Netbeans & Eclipse.

This looks like a very promising addition to the Attendance package but I have a few issues. I've installed this package without issue but the standard "report" tab gives me the "Nothing to display" message when the "All taken" pull down is selected. But there is data to display... When I change the display tab to "weeks" instead of "All taken" I get the data that should be displayed when using "All taken". The "Advanced report" feature is very exciting but I wonder, does it give any teacher in any course the ability to view site-wide attendance data? I'd like the admin to have this ability but not every teacher of every class.

Also, what are the "Teachers", "Subjects", "Titles", and "Scan" tabs for? And, is there supposed to be a method to download the data that is displayed by the "Advanced report"? I don't see one but there is mention of one in one of the help files. If I were to view sitewide attendance using this report I would definitely need to download it in Excel to be able to work with all of the data that would be generated.

One more edit to my comment here

Also, I notice in the report generated by the "Advanced report" tab, the following text appears in between the data for each student that is displayed:

"No attendance records exist for the user in this period"

Not sure why this is showing up in between each users data....?

Hi Jason,

Thanks for taking a look at it.

Re: The standard report's weeks tab. I don't believe I modified that report at all so if there is a bug it's part of the standard attendance module. I think there was some discussion about that in the forum where there might be a fix.

The files here in this tracker issue are a bit old and I have since redeveloped whole parts of the system. For one thing I will probably end up scrapping the 'Advanced Report', but it is intended that a user will only be able to view attendance for courses where they have the permission to do so. I also did post a fix for something to do with the courses select menu in the forum if you want to try it out. I don't want to spend much more time fiddling with that report as I've developed something else that's much more useful. We do have this on a production site working properly (only tested as site admin as it's the only role used by my client).

The "Teachers", "Subjects", "Titles" tabs are for adding storable meta data (not related to users with teacher role, courses, or topics). The institution I developed this for have many teachers (guest speakers) who just arrive on the day to teach and then leave, they never touch Moodle. Subjects in their context is the name of the class for that day. They have only a small number of 'Moodle Courses' buts loads of subjects/classes. They use Titles for session names like S1, S2, S3, etc, It's like on an iPod, where you easily search for a specific album, author, genre, etc. Adding support for that might have been a overkill though quite a few people in the forums seemed to like/need it.

Instead of "Teachers", "Subjects", "Titles" you could have "Location", "Fully Booked", "Importance", etc (by changing the language files) and then use it in exactly the same way for an entirely different purpose!

The "scan" tab was a stub of my Barcode scanning facility (now fully incorporated in my development version). Basically you can set up complicated rules like how late is late how early is left early and what % of a session should be attended etc (define as many as you like) and you can order these rules by severity (to determine which rule should be applied if more than one rule's conditions are met)

In my new module's Report you can download the entire report or print it with a special print function.

You can try out the module (and see how the report works) as it is at the moment at www.beauxcreations.com
You can find login instructions at http://www.beauxcreations.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=7. There are a few things that don't work yet.

It's a lot less cluttered now, tabs are grouped with subtabs.

Please don't use the files here on a production site. These initial versions will not be supported. Specifically, if you make use of the teacher, subject, title fields that data will be lost if you upgrade to my new version as the data types will change. However if you decide to upgrade from the standard/stable attendance module it should upgrade without any problems/data loss.

Would you like to see some/all of the features of this module merged into the stable version as optional features? I'm waiting for Dmitry to come back to me about it. Otherwise I might have to repackage it as a completely separate module or just keep on maintaining a patch (but that would be difficult considering my database changes).

Barry,

Thanks. Let's see, I have the most recent version of the attendance package (I think) installed on our production server and don't have the issue with "All taken" producing the "Nothing to display" error. I may have missed something on our test site (e.g. dates are out of range or something) but I thought I checked all of that before posting yesterday.

I understand all of the other explanations. Thank you very much.

Also, I'd really like to try the development version you have now but I can't seem to access it via the links you provided. I went to

www.beauxcreations.com

and logged in using User=teacher Pass=demo but when I click on the "Attendance" link under "Attendance tracking Solution with Barcode scanning", I get a red box with "More information about this error" in very small text.

I'd love to install this version on our test site and experiment with it. Is there a way that I can do that? Or have you developed this as a commercial add on instead of being Open Source?

Thanks again for your response and private e-mail informing me that you had responded

P.S. Yes, I'd love to see these features merged into the attendance package!!

P.P.S. (Edit again) Sorry, I just found the area where I can download the package. I've downloaded it and will give it a try on our test site. I still cannot access the module installed on your site though...?

Hi Jason,

You're welcome. I see the teacher demo only had non-editing teacher privileges. I've overriden it now for the attendance module so you should be able to try it now. Thanks for letting me know. The version you found is later than the ones here but not as far as the live demo. It's all open source as Moodle is open source.

You might notice in the live demo that you can't save dates in the Sessions grid yet. That's the biggest thing I guess I still need to fix and I want to get the AJAX calendar to work with Moodle's DML functions but so far it's proving a bit of a problem.

I don't think there should be anything wrong with the standard report (week view, etc). As I said I think there's a fix in the forum somewhere stating the same problem (not related to my modifications). Maybe this isn't the right place for this discussion
Edit: In the forums more people are likely to chime in and maybe explain what the fix is. I think it was a userdate() problem or something.

Cheers,

Barry

Deleted multiple posting text

Deleted multiple posting text. (Why can't I delete the entire post )

Barry,

I've just been experimenting with the package downloaded from your site and so far have found the following issues:

1. I still cannot see attendance data when selecting "Report" and have "All taken" selected. I removed your package and installed the basic package that can be found on Moodle.org and get the same result so I guess I have an issue elsewhere.

2. With this newest package I cannot see or alter the attendance score settings. In previous versions there was a P, L, E, A scheme that was used to score the students depending on their attendance status each day. This is gone now for some reason and I'm wondering if that might be part of the reason for the "Report" not begin available as well...? Strange thing is that if I select "Weeks" the data appears...? "Months" however, does not work either with the same "Nothing to display" error.

3. When I click on the "Barcodes" link I get a completely white page with the user names of the users registered in the course and icons just below them that look like broken image icons.

4. The strange "No attendance records exist for the user in this period" message that appeared in between each user on the "Advanced report" page is now gone.

Seems like I'm very close but there are a few issues that I can't rectify.

Sorry about the multiple postings here. I don't know what happened. I kept getting and error saying that this issue had been closed and that I couldn't comment on it. Looks like every time I tried and got that error that my message was in fact getting posted. Oops

P.S. Edit - I deleted everything and reinstalled and now the standard report works (both with the standard package and your modification). Sorry for the confusion there, I don't know what was happening.

Also, I see that you have removed the "Advanced report" from your most current live version. May I ask why? I don't see that functionality elsewhere... It's exactly what we'd like to have (possibly on the front page and only accessible to admins).

Barry,

Ok, I've experimented with the latest downloadable (from your site) version and have just a few small issues I'd like to comment on. First, please ignore my previous post. I managed to get the latest downloadable version running by deleting everything and installing it freshly instead of upgrading from a previous version.

The first issue that I notice is that when I create several attendance sessions and then take attendance on the first session, after I click the "OK" button at the bottom of the page (where attendance data is entered) all of the attendance sessions are updated. The first one with the data that I entered and all of the others with each user marked as being absent. I don't know why all sessions are affected when I'm only editing one session but this is an issue.

The second issue is that I don't see any way to download the data that is retrieved by the "Advanced report". That data is very useful and we really need to be able to download it in Excel format.

The third (small issue) is that I don't quite understand what the tab on the far right (Barcodes) is to be used for. Maybe if I scan a barcode into the area shown when I click on "Scan" I'll get some information in "Barcodes"...?

Thanks in advance for your attention and I'm sorry for cluttering the area up here.

Jason

Hi Jason,

Yes, I realised now that you must have just found this issue in the tracker somehow without reading the notices in the Forum which explains that you need to completely uninstall/delete the old package before installing this one. The live demo version can upgrade smoothly but because of the half finished features I'm not making it available yet. You can follow the progress here: http://www.beauxcreations.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=7 or just keep an eye out for changes in the live demo version.

I'm not sure how far the version you have downloaded is but here is how it's supposed to work (I don't recommend using this on a production server as you won't be able to use the new version without loosing some meta data (teachers,subjects,titles) if you upgrade later):

1.Setting Tab:
Define your rules for lateness, early leavers, absent, present using the <> logical operators etc. If you don't want automatic attendance calculation (from barcode scans) you have to set each of the new logical operators to '-' otherwise, every time a session finishes and you click on a report tab, the system will check your rules and apply them. By default everyone would be marked absent if you don't have any barcode scans and didn't change the settings...

2. Barcode Tab:
That page produces a barcode based on the value of a custom user profile field which you have to add and call it 'LOGIN'. It just displays a long list of barcodes for users in the current course, nothing else. I think you need the Image Barcode Pear Library for barcodes installed on your server to get this working. If you have cPanel it's really easy to install.

3. Scan Tab: (If you want to use this)
Each user needs at least one custom profile field entry (UNIQUE). When you scan them (from a list of barcodes or if you trust them with ID cards etc) in/out the system logs the time of each scan and matches them to the user. Later on, when any session is finished this data will be applied to determine which rule to apply.

4.Advanced Report
There is no way to download that data, the helpfile is not helpful... In my new grid report (as on the live demo) there is an Excel icon in the toolbar which allows you to download all the data. Which part of the advanced report is most desirable? (Detail View/Summary View)? The standard report already includes a summary and my new grid report already includes the detail so that's why I want to drop it. Only reason to keep it would be that it works without javascript (except for the live status editing with AJAX but that can be edited on the attendances.php page). There is a filter below the Sessions Grid where you have more/less the same drill down functionality as the advanced report plus you don't have to wait for page refreshes (there are a couple of bugs to fix, I know).

Cheers,

Barry