Filtered course list
Maintained by
Charles Fulton, Kevin Wiliarty, Andrew Zito
The Filtered Course List block displays a configurable list of courses. It is intended as a replacement for the My Courses block, although both may be used. It is maintained by the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP).
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Hi Kevin. Could you have a filtering by categories and completion status at the same time? Cheers!
Ok now I understand, but this issue seems to be something that i've seen several user asked (the ancestry question). Can we make this into a request for a future version? (version 4.1.3 for example? - I joke)
As usual, thanks for your support.
About your comment:
I'm afraid I'm not sure which suggestion of mine you're referring to. Did you try creating a filter of your own? If that is what you're doing then you should be able to fetch the courses any way you like. Or are you doing something else? I'll be happy to help, but I don't yet understand what you are describing.
About your question:
The results that you are describing are expected if your structure is like this:
Category 1
- Sub category 1
-- course 1
Category 2
- Sub category 2
-- Course 2
What I've listed above is slightly different from your version, but maybe it's what you meant, because that would explain the output. It often trips people up that the filtered course list does not recreate a category hierarchy. It's just not what it does. It can scan down into categories to find a user's courses, but it doesn't try to represent the whole tree. When it finds a course, it will show that course under a rubric based on the category it is in, even if that category is several levels deep. In your case, if the user is not enrolled in any courses directly in Category 1 or Category 2, then those categories will not show up. If the hierarchy is important then it may help to modify your "Category rubric template." If you change that template to "ANCESTRY / NAME", for instance, you are asking the block to display the rubric title as a string that consists of the category's ancestry and then the category name. Applied to the example above you ought to get:
Category 1 / Sub category 1
- course 1
Category 2 / Sub category 2
- Course 2
It's still not a tree; it won't ever be, but at least in the label for the rubric you can see the hierarchy. The main idea behind the configurable templates is to help resolve ambiguities. Imagine you had a structure like the following:
2019
- History
-- History 101
2020
- History
-- History 101
In a case like this the default templates would yield:
History
- History 101
History
- History 101
That's not so helpful, but you can change the category template to something like "NAME (PARENT)" to yield:
History (2019)
- History 101
History (2020)
- History 101
Does that help?
If the behavior you're seeing is different, please give me as many details as you can, and I will do my best to help sort it out.
I have two things to say, one comment and one question:
Comment: Regarding our discussion a few months back, I tried your solution, but it wouldn't work, as the plugin would sort the data after it has already been fetched, and it only fetches the courses the user is already logged in. That being said, if it's just me who would benefit from a solution of those sorts, then i'll keep doing it on my end.
Question:
For a different site, i'm trying to use your solution but i'm running short in understanding your documentation. My categories are as follows
Category 1
- Sub category 1
-- course 1
Category 2
- Sub category 2
- Course 2
However, i tried building it using your documentation (and i need to replicate the structure), using
category | collapsed | 0 | 0
which should fetch all the subcategories from the top category, but only creates
-sub category 1
-- course 1
- Sub category 2
-- course 2
and i tried using ancestries or
category | collapsed | 2 | 0
What am i doing wrong?
thanks!!
1. If your course short names are systematic, you could probably create shortname or regex filters based on those. You would have to supply the SCHOOL / YEAR as the label. Depending on how many of those you need this might be impractical.
2. If you are using a category filter, you could try setting the "Category rubric template" to include "ANCESTRY". That could work very well, perhaps in combination with including "CATEGORY" in the "Course name template."
The second choice will perhaps be exactly what you want if you don't have any courses above the UNIT level.
SCHOOL 1
- YEAR 1
- UNIT 1
Course 1
Course 2
- UNIT 2
Course 3
Course 4
- YEAR 2
...
SCHOOL 2
...
Give that a try and let me know if you have any other questions.
Cheers,
Kevin
I have the organization for my courses
SCHOOL / YEAR / UNIT / courses
I can only display with the plugin the level UNIT
I'd like to display the SCHOOL and the YEAR ! Is it possible ?
In reading that line of code, i realized exactly what you wrote, that the filter will always get the courses that the user is enrolled in. That being said, due to some specifics of the site i work in, i have to show the combo list in the dashboard, instead of the Site Home, where said setting does exist. So i changed it to fetch all the courses in the site, then used your simplest example filter (category | collapsed | 0 (= top level) | 0 (= all decendants)) and it worked perfectly. My "suggestion" (i have no idea if it's even a suggestion) would be: is it possible to create a setting, a general setting, in which the user fetches all the courses, or just the enrolled ones? Something in the lines of :
if ($setting == 1){
$this->mycourses = enrol_get_my_courses(null, "$sortstring");
}
else{
$this->mycourses = coursecat::get(0)->get_courses(array('recursive' => true));
}
However, i don't know if it would impact a lot your plugin.
Anyway....thanks a lot!