[Contrib: Evaluation System] If a survey is closed and then reopened it loses its original dates

[Adam Marshall]

Thanks for that explanation. It makes more sense now.

The main reason why people close surveys is to see what results have been garnered part-way through the survey (fairly common but, if possible, we intend to address this by letting people view results of open surveys)

Adam

| -----Original Message-----
| From: azeckoski at gmail.com [mailto:azeckoski at gmail.com] On Behalf Of
| Aaron Zeckoski
| Sent: 17 May 2010 12:30
| To: Adam Marshall
| Cc: evaluation at collab.sakaiproject.org
| Subject: Re: [Contrib: Evaluation System] If a survey is closed and
| then reopened it loses its original dates
| 
| To provide the technical background here:
| When a survey is forced closed the dates are adjusted so that the
| closing date is set for the nearest future minute and the other dates
| are adjusted to correspond. Since dates completely control the state
| of an evaluation this is the only way to actually cause one to close
| early.
| When the evaluation is reopened the closing date would be in the past
| (along with the other dates). To correct for this the system will use
| the default length controls to set the initial dates and then places
| the user on the page with the dates directly in front of them and
| controls to adjust them.
| 
| As for the issue, I don't really see the problem here. If a user
| closes the evaluation then they clearly did not care about the dates
| anymore so why would they expect them to be retained? If you move an
| event on your calendar do you expect it to remember all the previous
| dates it was associated with?
| 
| If you have users closing and reopening evaluations a lot then perhaps
| there is a reason why they are doing this. I suspect this is the real
| issue.
| 
| -AZ
| 
| 
| On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Adam Marshall
| <adam.marshall at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
| > Aaron suggested that I ask the list's opinion on this matter.
| >
| > Some of our users have complained that when a survey is (temporally)
| closed and reopened the original closing dates are replaced by the
| default close date.
| >
| > Say today is the 17 may (which it is). Set up a survey and change the
| default close date (say 20 may) to be 18 June, assign it to a group and
| so on.
| >
| > Then go into the dashboard and close survey then go back and re-open.
| The survey close date will now NOT be 18 June but will be set to the
| default close date (20 may).
| >
| > We find this to be counter intuitive and has caused problems with
| people not noticing that the close date has been silently brought
| forward.
| >
| > I would propose that the original dates be kept when a survey is
| closed & reopened. Is there any good reason why this shouldn't be the
| case?
| >
| > Adam
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| >
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| 
| 
| 
| --
| Aaron Zeckoski - Software Engineer - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile