Joseph - As regards point #1, as I understand it, the preview button will randomize and if you want to see a different quiz then you press the Start Again button to see 2 different randomly selected questions. This allows for testing things like saving some answers and coming back to the preview.

From Anthony Borrow (aborrow at jesuitcp.org) Thursday, 13 July 2006, 10:58 PM:

As regards #2, I am unable to replicate this or have not seen this behavior and I frequently create and use randomized questions. Could you provide me a gift file of your questions and verify that the quiz questions are from the correct category. A screenshot may be helpful.

From Anthony Borrow (aborrow at jesuitcp.org) Thursday, 13 July 2006, 11:00 PM:

As regards #3, I agree that when you click to add 5 random questions from a particular category that it should check for the number of questions at that time. I do support a check on runtime as well as it attempts to explain what is happening.

From Anthony Borrow (aborrow at jesuitcp.org) Thursday, 13 July 2006, 11:12 PM:

I agree that #3 should be addressed. It could either be an interface issue or perhaps a feature request. Perhaps a function should be created to return the number of random questions available in a given category. Then that function could be called prior to generating a quiz and report the error that a complete quiz cannot be generated. I am thinking here that the advantage would be to avoid not seeing an incompletely generated quiz when viewed by pages. It would check to ensure that a complete quiz could be generated and then do it. This could also prevent teacher from adding too many random questions. For some reason, I thought that this was checked previously but it did not appear to be when I created a quiz on test.moodle.com

1) As Anthony rightly says, this is not a bug. The quiz preview intentionally keeps the same preview attempt open until you click the 'Start again' button, then it re-randomises.

2a) The preview link makes no sense, and should be removed. This is a duplicate of MDL-6650.

2b) The edit screen is useful. It lets you change the two important properties of the random question (which category is picked from, and whether subcategories are included). So not a bug.

3) This is a genuine issue that is not reported elsewhere, I am editing this bug report so that it covers this single issue.

Brain-dump of how such a check could be implemented:

The following test would have to be done every time the list of question in the quiz changed, and every time questions were created, deleted, moved to another category or imported. However, we would have to be sure this did not make everything unbearably slow.

1. Given a list of question ids. (e.g. all the questions in a particular quiz).

2. Get a list of all the categories that contain random questions from the list of question ids.

3. For each of those categories, compare:

A) The number of questions in that category that are not in the list of questionids, and which are of a type that can be used by the random question type

and

B) The number of random questions from the list in this category, or in a parent of this category and which are set to pick from the parent category and its subcategories.

4. If any of the comparisons give the wrong answer, display a warning message listing the categories that do not have enough questions.