Ad-hoc database queries

This report plugin allows Administrators to set up arbitrary database queries to act as ad-hoc reports. Reports can be of two types, either run on demand, or scheduled to run automatically. Other users with the right capability can go in and see a list of queries that they have access to. Results can be viewed on-screen or downloaded as CSV.
Price option: Free

Supports Moodle 1.9-5.1 See all versions
Latest release: 2 weeks ago
Installations: 4762
Downloads (last 90 days): 678

Frankenstyle name: report_customsql
Reports

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In due course, yet. Right now, when I ran the automated tests in 3.1, something failed. I don't remember what, and since then I have not had time to fix it. I don't think it will be anything very serious.
If you have a test server, try running the current code with Moodle 3.1. It might acutally work.
Hi Tim,
Will this officially support Moodle 3.1?
Not possible.
quick question that probably has been answered although i couldn't find it on the documentation: is it possible to create a paginated report? let's say i have 1000 records, i don't want to have an immense scroll. Thanks
I'm running Moodle 3.0.2 and am experiencing issues with the automatic email element of the plugin. I have tested with two different users, but as yet neither user has received a scheduled report email. I can see from the plugin interface that the daily query is running successfully and I can view the output within Moodle, but what's happened to the email is a mystery. Any tips on how to track down where the problem might lie (i.e. within Moodle/the plugin vs my mailserver?)
Re: Suggested fix for null context
I tested the changes in commit 5d35b97. I did not experience any error or notice messages on my pages. I created, edited, and deleted a query via the "Ad-hoc database queries" report page, and did not experience any problems.
Moodle's userdate is a wrapper around strftime, and http://php.net/manual/en/function.strftime.php says both %F and %T are fine. I don't know why it does not work for you. Anyway, that is the date format we want for this report.
Thanks for finding the event problem. I just pushed what I think is the right fix to and eventfix branch in git: https://github.com/moodleou/moodle-report_customsql/tree/eventfix. However, I don't have time to test this. Can you test?
Re: Suggested fix for null context
In each of the 3 event classes that this plugin has, the get_url() function wants to use $this->context. However, sometimes that context is null, and I get notice messages like the following on my page.
Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\moodle\report\customsql\classes\event\query_edited.php on line 51
The fix is to use $this->get_context(), which will create a context if it does not exist yet.
Re: Human-readable date strings not displaying
I have discovered that when report_customsql_generate_csv() determines that a value should be formatted as a date string, it calls userdate(), providing it with a format string of '%F %T'. With that format string, the return is always a empty string.
In contrast, if userdate() is called with no format string, then the return is a valid string such as “Tuesday, 8 March 2016, 1:17 PM”. Therefore, the format string of ‘%F %T’ is suspect.
Perhaps a better alternative would be to use one of the format strings in “moodle\lang\[language code]\langconfig.php” ?
Yes. Sorry, I think you will need to debug this one yourself.
Re: Human-readable date strings not displaying
Thanks for the quick response.
The values for course_completions.timecompleted in my query result are indeed non-NULL integers. The WHERE clause I use in my query ensures that. I can execute the same query directly on the database (removing curly braces from and adding the 'mdl_' prefix back to the table names, of course), and I get integer values for that column.
I do have the debug setting set to DEVELOPER. When I run the query from Moodle, I do not observe any error output on the page.
Looks like the report_customsql_get_element_type() function is the starting point for my investigation. I will see where it leads.
Check directly in the database. Does this column actually contain integers, or blank (null)?
Also, turn on Debugging to verify there is no error message.
Moodle version: 3.0.2
Ad-hoc database queries plugin version: 3.0
I used this plugin to create the following query, which lists courses that are completed.
select u.username, c.shortname, rec.timecompleted, rec.timecompleted as cdate
from {course_completions} rec
inner join {user} u
on rec.userid = u.id
inner join {course} c
on rec.course = c.id
where rec.timecompleted is not NULL
A comment in the query editing page says:
| If a column name in the results ends with the characters date, and the column contains integer values,
| then they will be treated as Unix time-stamps, and automatically converted to human-readable dates.
The timecompleted field of the course_completions table in the database definitely contains integer values. And in my query, I tell it to have a column in the result whose name ends with 'date'.
However, when I run the query, my 'cdate' column is not getting human-readable date strings. I just get blanks.
Do you have any suggestions on what the problem is?
Thank you.
Hi Tim, the reports are now running fine and the problem was not connected to the plugin. I think something temporarily happened to the fileserver containing the reports which caused the error. Cheers for your help and for the excellent plugin.
Since of the archive will not be a problem (unless the disc gets full!) No idea why it is not working. If you have PHP skills, it would be good if you could try to debug this.