[Contrib: Evaluation System] provider not being called

[Stephen Marquard]

I have a vague memory of round about when this changed. It may have been
related to changes around user roles in an evaluation (i.e. student, TA,
instructor, etc.) but it wasn't a functional requirement of any of UCT's
changes so I think it was more of a back-end refactor as Aaron says to
address performance issues.

We've found it a minor usability issue that creates occasional support
calls (mostly because the behaviour is unexpected compared to other
tools), so we'd support introducing some type of periodic
synchronization update (an event listener on realm.upd events could be
one mechanism for our use case). 

Where I do think it's appropriate is that when the evaluation closes,
the set of users at whom it was targetted should be static (i.e.
changing membership of the site or whatever shouldn't affect the
completion rate, etc.).

Also to clarify, AFAIK we don't use a provider as such for evals (i.e.
it uses the membership of our Sakai sites), so the issue is slightly
higher level than the way an evals provider is invoked (or maybe that's
just semantics, not being too familiar with the backend internals).

Regards
Stephen 
 
>>> Aaron Zeckoski <azeckoski at unicon.net> 9/29/2010 4:53 PM >>> 
In short, the provider is consulted when the evaluation is created
(or, more accurately, when the assignments are adjusted). First, the
provider will determine which groups are viable to be selected. Then
the provider answers the questions about who is allowed to take the
eval and who is being evaluated in those groups. Both of these types
of data are mapped into the tables for the evaluation. The groups data
was always mapped into the tables since version 0.1 (maybe 5 years
ago). The memberships change is fairly recent by comparison (as in, it
happened about 2 years ago).

Providers don't do anything with tables. They only are able to answer
questions and do not really know anything about the internals of the
system (nor should they). It is not timed. It is action driven. There
is no syncing unless the assignments are changed.

My memory on the precise reasoning behind these changes is somewhat
fuzzy at this point since it has been quite awhile since the changes
were made but I do recall it was related to performance and relevance
of the data. I think UCT was at least partially involved so Marquard
might have some comments.

-AZ



 

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