This would be very CPU intensive but I think it's worth looking at.

What about just changing how the "Server files" browsing works?

Category>Course>Section>Activity/Resource>File is very precise but having to remember the topic and resource a file was added to, is not feasible for me anyhow

Would it not just be possible to have Category>Course - lists all files or at worst Category>Course>Section>file list

Thoughts?

The problem is that we have files all over the place, such as:

• assignment submissions
• forum attachments
• embedded media in labels
• resources

etc

Surely we can't just smoosh all that together in the browsing interface ...

Good point.

Currently too precise, my suggestion is too general, whats a usable middle group?

No clue on solution.

Would a search facility at this level be the first stage to be being able to link in Dublin Core Meta tag data to the uploaded resources? I think I would be really useful to be able to search by tags on the files, as well as file names... I appreciate that this would add load to the servers; but is that justifiable by the added functionality it would bring?

I think this discussion is related: search, possible re-org, visibility of this area, some confusing breadcrumbs: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=154880

Just to make some noise. There's way too many places where files can be and ordinary users shouldn't have to be bothered. They just want to find the file. A lost of available files (regardless of where they come from) and a decent search is surely the answer. They don't want to know about 'Recent files', 'Site files', 'Private files'.....

This issue is affecting MP clients. Please give it priority.

I have no idea how the back end of the files works - but this seems incredibly important for encouraging people to re-use / link to files. If it is too difficult people will just re-upload the file. (side question - if someone uploads an identical file with a different name - does the database end up storing one or two files?)

I actually think Gavin's suggestion is a very good one - show all the files in a course, in alphabetical order. I would suggest adding filters as checkboxes to determine what is shown. By default I would imagine assignment submissions, forum attachments would be off, and resources, assignment attachments (ie: files linked in the editor), labels etc would be on. Extra useful if there was a filter for file types. I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement, but I imagine usability to be high.

For your side question: if anyone uploads a file again then it gets stored internally just once.

This issue was assigned to me automatically, however I will not be able to work on this issue in the immediate future. In order to create a truer sense of the state of this issue and to allow other developers to have chance to become involved, I am removing myself as the assignee of this issue.
For more information, see http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Changes_to_issue_assignment

Could we not have a simple Search by File Name, which only searches the "Current Course" by default, or searches the folder currently being displayed? (Limited to course and not Site Level search?)

Currently a number of my staff are continuing to use "Legacy Course Files" because, as one staff member said, "It's too hard to find my files in the site files".

Thoughts?

Also another comment in line with Michael Blake to see if we can ad some priority to this issue. Numerous clients are asking for this feature. MootAU also saw me hit up with several requests. Thanks MarkD for reporting the issue.

Any chance we could at least have this assigned to someone at HQ so it does not just fade into the ether.

We don't "assign things to people at HQ" like that ... it's already in the BACKEND queue with some priority dues to votes and partner labels.

Just noting that a proof of concept was developed as part of the investigation which took place in MDL-48908: https://github.com/FMCorz/moodle/compare/7357af2...MDL-48908-master

Fred's solution is quicker than my solution as it involves paging. I will write some testing instructions and put it up for peer review.

FYI my change before I change the diff on this issue - https://github.com/markn86/moodle/compare/master...MDL-23296_master.

Fred has agreed to take this issue and push it forward.

Pushing for peer review. In short we do a raw query on the database, then manually check if each of the results are visible to the user. To reduce the load the queries are done in chunk, with a maximum number of loops (arbitrary values for now). The chunking is used in conjunction with pagination.

The downside is that if there are too many results and you don't have access to the n (current 3000) first results, your file will not be found. We could potentially display a different message to the user but that requires changes in the filepicker API so I'd rather do that as a separate issue.

Thanks,
Fred

Code verified against automated checks.

Checked MDL-23296 using repository: git://github.com/FMCorz/moodle.git

• master (0 errors / 0 warnings) [branch: MDL-23296-master | CI Job]

_{More information about this report}

Hey Fred,

I have reviewed the code and can't seem to poke any holes in it. In order to understand what it is doing a bit better I did pull in your code and ran through the tests you wrote up (not with a large dataset though) and everything seems pretty good/responsive.

Pushing for integration review.

The main moodle.git repository has just been updated with latest weekly modifications. You may wish to rebase your PULL branches to simplify history and avoid any possible merge conflicts. This would also make integrator's life easier next week.

TIA and ciao

Moving this issue to current integration cycle, will be reviewed soon. Thanks for the hard work!

Fails against automated checks.

Checked MDL-23296 using repository: git://github.com/FMCorz/moodle.git

• master [branch: MDL-23296-master | CI Job]
  • Error: Unable to fetch information from MDL-23296-master branch at git://github.com/FMCorz/moodle.git.

_{More information about this report}

Hi Fred, many thanks, this looks a good solution for a technically complex issue. A couple of questions before integrating it:

• search_server_files $from is set to 0 and $limit is set to 20, https://github.com/FMCorz/moodle/compare/dba564c...MDL-23296-master#diff-6c0a8861eef371f78dde4be1467a8a1fR1981 I can't figure out why 20; you are setting seach() $limit to 100 by default and search_server_files count is being called with from and limit values to null and null; also these null values are later passed to get_recorset_sql which expects int values (I guess these nulls are converted to int=0 at some point because it works as expected, I haven't followed the code)
• About the search_server_files count outside the $page <= 1 if/else; when $page > 1, are you calling it again in case new files have been added since last time it run? I may be missing something, but if the count value differs then we should "restart" the search, as we order through file name; if that is not the case looks like we could save 1 db query storing that count value in the session.

I've been told that Fred is on Holidays. I don't think these 2 minor issues should block this from being integrated, so pushing the changes. Integrated to master. Thanks.

Thanks Fred, I've create many test courses with different sizes and names, and it's working really nice. Passing

Only because the sky is full of stars you may think that your brightness is not enough perceived.

Let me tell you, you're wrong!

We need sun-glasses whenever your awesome work helps Moodle to become better and better.

Highly appreciated, closing this as fixed, ciao

Just noting I added a QA test for humans to enjoy testing - here - MDLQA-7639

Removing the docs_required label as this improvement is now documented: https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Server_files_repository

If you notice that the documentation can be improved, please feel free to log in to the wiki and edit the page.

Help in keeping Moodle documentation accurate and up-to-date is much appreciated

MDL-54896 reported - search does not work in the "tree" display

Note that MDL-54896 is not related to this issue, this one is about the Server files repository, the other one about the File system. Now, both could be affected as IIRC the tree display does not support dynamic loading, I'll double check.