Site-level users with grading capability receive Assignment emails

Here is a forum discussion about this: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=123917

Hi we have the same role named General Support at site level as defined in the above description.

In our case General Support role receives Feedback emails and they have capability for the followings

mod/feedback:viewreports
mod/feedback:view

Moodle 1.9.5

Mike - I hope you don't mind that I added you as a watcher to this issue. Feel free to un-watch if you do not have time. Based on your comment in the forum (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=123917#p543152) I figured you might be able to come up with an updated patch file to attach to this issue. If not, just let me know and I'll try to do so.

I do agree that just getting the folks that have the mod/assignment:grade capability is a little too broad as it includes site admins. Perhaps we could add an option to email all graders (including admin) or only course graders. For those looking for an immediate work around, site admins could disable their email but then they would not receive any emails from Moodle. Alternatively, the teacher could create a group with all of their students and themselves in it and since the site admins are not part of that group and if the assignment is setup for separate groups that should also exclude the admins.

Peace - Anthony

Would anyone watching this issue be able to check if this is an issue in Moodle 2.0? Peace - Anthony

Hi there,

This has just come up for us when trying to create an "Academic leader" role to allow academic management to have the same rights as tutors, throughout a faculty, without receiving all the email notifications.

It seems to me that it would work well if "get email notifications of assignment submission" was a separate permission to mod/assignment:grade.

This would be consistent with Quizzes, where there is a seperate "Get email notification of submissions" permission and a "Grade quizzes manually" permission.

Cheers,
Craig

Following Craigs comment I decided to have a go at adding an extra role which was relatively straightforward to do with changes to just one line and additions to two others. This was done on Moodle 2.0+
This is not recommended for production servers and is for information purposes only.

In moodle/mod/assignment/db/access.php are the list of capabilities that assignment module supports. In here I added

'mod/assignment:receivemail' => array(

'captype' => 'read',
'contextlevel' => CONTEXT_MODULE,
'archetypes' => array(
'teacher' => CAP_ALLOW,
'editingteacher' => CAP_ALLOW
)
),

Which creates a new capability called receivemail for the assignment module for teacher and editingteacher roles.

Then in moodle/mod/assignment/lib.php within the function get_graders I changed the capability that is required to get sent an email.

To do this change
$potgraders = get_users_by_capability($this->context, 'mod/assignment:grade', '', '', '', '', '', '', false, false);

to

$potgraders = get_users_by_capability($this->context, 'mod/assignment:receivemail', '', '', '', '', '', '', false, false);

That is all that is required. The other addition that needs to be made is to the language file to add strings for the new capability.

In moodle/mod/assignment/lang/en/assignment.php add the line
$string['assignment:receivemail'] = 'Receive Submission Notification';

Could someone change the list of versions that this affects as it should also include 2.0+ which is what I am using and also appears to still affect the latest 2.2+

I am experiencing the same thing on Moodle 2.2. I've tested this thoroughly and it is clearly the mod/assignment:grade permission which is causing site level roles to be sent email notifications of submissions.

I've written up Matthew Cannings' patch (with some tweaks) against 2.3 master and bumped the affected versions. Near as I can tell get_graders() is used for this purpose only, so it might be a good idea to rename the function completely. For now I altered the inline docs to make it clear what it's doing and why.

Hi Charles,

Thanks a lot for your work. The patch looks great.

There are two things about this issue though:

1) We don't tend to add new capabilities on stable branches without special approval as it isrupts the stable nature of the branch and can change peoples setup (in this case it could mean custom grader roles are broken with assignment notificates, for example).

So getting this into the stable branch is going a debate for discussion. Getting it into master is also going to be problematic as to complicate matters a new assignment module is being developed for 2.3 making this perhaps not relevant for master..

But..

2) I think in this particular case of the described issue, one way to solve it which might in fact be more correct could is to use the function 'get_enrolled_sql()'. This isn't very well documented i'm afraid but it is new in 2.x allowing you to retrieve only users enrolled on a course with a capability. This would mean that only users enrolled on the course with the grade capability would get the email. See forum_get_potential_subscribers() for one use of this.

Hi, Charles.

I've just triaged this issue, but please don't stop working on it.

Sorry, I'm only now getting back to this. get_enrolled_sql makes perfect sense and (I think) preferable to a new capability. Patch rewritten.

This makes sense to me.

If you create branches for 21_STABLE, 22_STABLE and also fill out more extensive testing instructions I will push this for integration.

Rebased against current master and additional branches created. Sorry for the delay.

Integrated (21, 22 & master), thanks!

Works as described in master

Also works as described in 2.2 and 2.1 stable. Passing.

This has been near becoming rejected, because it's not the best code you are able to produce.

But, luckily, at the end, it has landed and has been spread to all repos out there.

Many thanks and, don't forget it, keep improving your skills, you can!

Closing, ciao