cron job does not update moodle gradebook from wwassignment

[mgage]

I am currently using Moodle 3.2.1. The webwork version is 2.12.

I have used moodle webwork integration to use webwork assignments in Moodle. However, grades are not being reflected in the gradebook.

I have to turn editing on. Then to edit of the assignment and save and back to course in order to see the updated grades.

I seems like the cron job for wwassignment isn't working.
(Renate Mittelmann, Karan Uppal

I can verify the problem. The cause is that wwassignment is using older methods for logging events -- unless you set specific legacy flags this means that nothing involving wwassignment is logged. The cron job only updates courses for which there has been recent wwassignment activity (as viewed in mdl_log).

The long term fix will be to update wwassignment to conform to the logging tools used in moodle 3.x.

For the short term one can force updating the gradebook by editing one or more of the wwassignments in the moodle course and saving the edit.

When they are ready updates will appear on https://github.com/openwebwork/wwassignment. Pull requests are welcome -- many of you have more expertise in developing moodle modules than I do. I will be happy to help with any issues on the webwork end of the communication.

-- Mike Gage

[jcharaoui]

There's also an additional issue to consider: the wwassignment_cron task is currently excruciatingly slow and/or poorly optimized. On our mid-size Moodle instance, we have about 30 seldom used WebWorK activities:

Processing module function wwassignment_cron ...
... used 701 dbqueries
... used 177,59930801392 seconds

[mgage]

FIXED:

The wwassignment module for Moodle was updated in August, 2017. It is available at the site
https://github.com/openwebwork/wwassignment. I think that will both make sure that the wwassignment_cron task runs and that it will only update courses that have changed since the last time the cron task was run. Please report back if your experience is different.
;

[mgage]

Hi Jerome, I’m on spring break so I have some time to trouble shoot the wwassignment module this week. FIXED: The wwassignment module for Moodle was updated in August, 2017. It is available at the site https://github.com/openwebwork/wwassignment <https://github.com/openwebwork/wwassignment>. I think that will both make sure that the wwassignment_cron task runs and that it will only update courses that have changed since the last time the cron task was run. Please report back if your experience is different. ; — Make sure you have the updated version of wwassignment and let me know if it still 1. doesn’t update the grades from WeBWorK to moodle if the grades have changed 2. or updates courses in Moodle that are dormant. It’s possible that my check to see if the webwork activity has been used recently in a moodle course is not accurate enough for your use case. The cron task is trying to see if an update should be triggered by only looking at activity in the moodle log — it doesn’t have direct access to activity in the webwork application. Thanks for your feedback. Take care, Mike [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>.edu

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On Mar 7, 2018, at 3:48 PM, Jerome Charaoui ***@***.***> wrote: There's also an additional issue to consider: the wwassignment_cron task is currently excruciatingly slow. On our mid-size Moodle instance, we have about 30 seldom used WebWorK activities: Processing module function wwassignment_cron ... ... used 701 dbqueries ... used 177,59930801392 seconds — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_openwebwork_wwassignment_issues_2-23issuecomment-2D371279304&d=DwMFaQ&c=kbmfwr1Yojg42sGEpaQh5ofMHBeTl9EI2eaqQZhHbOU&r=C6Pt5AGtImanmAdcooarL-JZO8M5dSFPfs3VweYXYkE&m=n2iIpk3A_r7XngmA_4sAP0fZDL-NxpBGEmtZMhzOnU8&s=CdVNx3TLJtEh3hQLc9MDC7xta6n8LqvGJDC5YPcAmBI&e=>, or mute the thread <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_notifications_unsubscribe-2Dauth_ABJdfEsuZzIOLC73mnMKCSImppoJG3M9ks5tcEeXgaJpZM4L-2Dkpr&d=DwMFaQ&c=kbmfwr1Yojg42sGEpaQh5ofMHBeTl9EI2eaqQZhHbOU&r=C6Pt5AGtImanmAdcooarL-JZO8M5dSFPfs3VweYXYkE&m=n2iIpk3A_r7XngmA_4sAP0fZDL-NxpBGEmtZMhzOnU8&s=PCqKMfHmUhGhIxETe1YLPVhckGV_j2eZxFDZL0Fvhkw&e=>.

[jcharaoui]

Hi Mike, I'm running the following version, which should correspond to the latest version:
87e09069dfe809e6f07a4e6e074fa248c20dbdfe mod/wwassignment (heads/ver3.0)

I'll have to query teachers to see if they even use grades from WebWorK. All I can say at this point is that the task itself is quite taxing on our instance, probably because our mdl_log table is rather large and contains millions of entries.

[mgage]

Hi Jerome, I’ve finally gotten a preliminary version of the moodle/webwork/webassign and other things installed on my macbook pro laptop which I can use for development without risking the production machines. I finished the new version of wwassignment_cron (which inspects the new activity log mdl_logstore_standard_log database (not mdl_log which is no longer used in moodle 3.x) just before the semester started last year — it was a bit rushed so I’m sure that efficiency can be improved — I’m the only one using moodle here at Rochester so I don’t immediately see problems with large databases. Your comments are quite helpful. Here is the data I’m getting with wwassignment_cron update compared with yours— Summary of cron job run Processing module function wwassignment_cron ... ... used 7605 dbqueries ... used 8.2005059719086 seconds done. Report from Jerome Charaoui Processing module function wwassignment_cron ... ... used 701 dbqueries ... used 177,59930801392 seconds. (french use of decimal point) Notice that even with 10 times more dbqueries the time elapsed was 1/20 on my macbook pro compared to your machine — not sure why that was. The macbook has an SSD — so that is one possible explanation. It also seems to me that 7605 queries is excessive but it may take me a while to find the inefficiency since spring break ends this weekend and I have a bunch of projects (including class preparation -) ) but I have this on my stack of things to work on. While setting up my laptop I also created a new ver3.1 branch on github.com/openwebwork <http://github.com/openwebwork> for wwassignment. It’s actually the same as the ver3.0 branch that you have I think, but it has the code which looks at mdl_logstore_standard_log database instead of mdl_log and deserves its own number. Take care, Mike

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On Mar 7, 2018, at 3:48 PM, Jerome Charaoui ***@***.***> wrote: There's also an additional issue to consider: the wwassignment_cron task is currently excruciatingly slow. On our mid-size Moodle instance, we have about 30 seldom used WebWorK activities: Processing module function wwassignment_cron ... ... used 701 dbqueries ... used 177,59930801392 seconds — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_openwebwork_wwassignment_issues_2-23issuecomment-2D371279304&d=DwMFaQ&c=kbmfwr1Yojg42sGEpaQh5ofMHBeTl9EI2eaqQZhHbOU&r=C6Pt5AGtImanmAdcooarL-JZO8M5dSFPfs3VweYXYkE&m=n2iIpk3A_r7XngmA_4sAP0fZDL-NxpBGEmtZMhzOnU8&s=CdVNx3TLJtEh3hQLc9MDC7xta6n8LqvGJDC5YPcAmBI&e=>, or mute the thread <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_notifications_unsubscribe-2Dauth_ABJdfEsuZzIOLC73mnMKCSImppoJG3M9ks5tcEeXgaJpZM4L-2Dkpr&d=DwMFaQ&c=kbmfwr1Yojg42sGEpaQh5ofMHBeTl9EI2eaqQZhHbOU&r=C6Pt5AGtImanmAdcooarL-JZO8M5dSFPfs3VweYXYkE&m=n2iIpk3A_r7XngmA_4sAP0fZDL-NxpBGEmtZMhzOnU8&s=PCqKMfHmUhGhIxETe1YLPVhckGV_j2eZxFDZL0Fvhkw&e=>.

[jcharaoui]

Hi Mike, thanks for coming back to me. I got to speak with some of our teachers on our side and it turns out that they do collect WebWorK grades but do so by manually importing them into a third party database. So we have no use for those in Moodle.

What would help us, in this case, would be for the module to switch to the new Task API. I'll create a separate issue to track that specific request.

[mgage]

The new Task API may make things easier. We’ll look in to it this summer. I’d still be interested in figuring out why your case takes so long to process the activity log file. In the meantime if you just want to avoid the hassle of waiting for wwassignment to perform updates you can comment out the line 524 in wwassignment/lib.php: // _wwassignment_update_dirty_sets(); traceLog("---------------------End wwassignment_cron------------------------"); The call to _wwassignment_update_dirty_sets() is made from within wwassignment_cron() Commenting out the call to _wwassignment_update_dirty_sets() should make the wwassignment_cron() a “no-op” function. As long as you are not using the grade return to moodle there will be no problem. For the future, if you are mostly interested in single sign-on you can also investigate the LTI interface between webwork and moodle. It has the advantage of being widely accepted standard (wwassignment was created before LTI existed). LTI is still not so great at returning multiple scores from a homework set however — but hopefully that will also change in the near future. http://webworkgoehle.blogspot.com/2016/03/webwork-lti-authentication.html Take care, Mike

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On Mar 17, 2018, at 1:27 AM, Jerome Charaoui ***@***.***> wrote: Hi Mike, thanks for coming back to me. I got to speak with some of our teachers on our side and it turns out that they do collect WebWorK grades but do so by manually importing them into a third party database. So we have no use for those in Moodle. What would help us, in this case, would be for the module to switch to the new Task API. I'll create a separate issue to track that specific request. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_openwebwork_wwassignment_issues_2-23issuecomment-2D373895794&d=DwMFaQ&c=kbmfwr1Yojg42sGEpaQh5ofMHBeTl9EI2eaqQZhHbOU&r=C6Pt5AGtImanmAdcooarL-JZO8M5dSFPfs3VweYXYkE&m=Cr2riGiBzoNicuOo08OU1DdKaQCPjYiEj1KgGAa3rWs&s=Yvi6ali8It7UO6c00Df37DBCsdZOfdAxbRVdj7ONDMg&e=>, or mute the thread <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_notifications_unsubscribe-2Dauth_ABJdfClTAIWfa2kbKecH-5FDDiWG-5FKIAfIks5tfJ60gaJpZM4L-2Dkpr&d=DwMFaQ&c=kbmfwr1Yojg42sGEpaQh5ofMHBeTl9EI2eaqQZhHbOU&r=C6Pt5AGtImanmAdcooarL-JZO8M5dSFPfs3VweYXYkE&m=Cr2riGiBzoNicuOo08OU1DdKaQCPjYiEj1KgGAa3rWs&s=DukiuxM-7H4fVCjVKYve8yVSvLXxuF7-g_m5Yn4OYj0&e=>.