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Deleting orphaned questions fromo Moodle

Prerequisites

  • Set up the webserver on the Moodle instance.
  • Set up your local machine.
  • Use createrepo.php, exportrepofrommoodle.php and importrepotomoodle.php to manage your repository.
  • Version 4.1.5+ of Moodle is required for this functionality (or 4.2.2+ as 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 are not compatible).

Deleting

  • After running importrepotomoodle.php you may be informed of questions in Moodle that are no longer linked to your repository - either there is no manifest entry (i.e. the question has been added to Moodle after export) or there is no question file in the repo (i.e. the question has been deleted from the repo).
  • From the commandline in the cli folder run deletefrommoodle.php. There are a number of options you can input. List them all with php deletefrommoodle.php -h. You can use -shortname or --longname on the command line followed by a space and the value.
  • You will be given the option to delete the questions from Moodle one at a time.
Short Long Required value
i moodleinstance Key of Moodle instance in moodleinstances to use. Should match end of instance URL.
r rootdirectory Directory on user's computer containing repos.
f manifestpath Filepath of manifest file relative to root directory.
d directory Directory of repo on users computer containing "top" folder, relative to root directory.
s subdirectory Relative subdirectory of repo to actually import.
l contextlevel Context in which to place questions. Set to system, coursecategory, course or module
c coursename Unique course name for course or module context.
m modulename Unique (within course) module name for module context.
g coursecategory Unique course category name for coursecategory context.
n instanceid Numerical id of the course, module of course category.
t token Security token for webservice.
h help
x ignorecat Regex of categories to ignore - add an extra leading / for Windows.

Examples:

php deletefrommoodle.php -t 4ec7cd3f62e08f595df5e9c90ea7cfcd -i edmundlocal -r "C:\question_repos" -d "source_1" --contextlevel system

The arguments are the same as for importrepotomoodle and the questions are identified in the same way as explained there. This task is just to separate out the deletion process from the import process as a safeguard.

On failure

  • If the script fails, it can be safely run again once the issue has been dealt with. Questions that have already been deleted will be removed from the manifest file and you will not need to approve deletion again.

Possibility of data loss

Version checks when importing and commit checks when exporting should mitigate most issues with import/export. User would have to export questions, discard the changes and then import to cause problems but even then the previous versions of the questions would still be in Moodle. The old version of a question can be selected for edit and then saved without changes to make it the latest version - a pain if many questions are involved but recoverable. Delete does introduce the possibility of data loss if the user has never exported the question (which could happen if they begin by using subcategories/subdirectories and then start dealing with the whole context). Users have to run the delete script specially, however, and confirm the deletion of each question individually after already having seen a list of all the questions that are in Moodle but not in the repo. Also, any questions that are used in quizzes will be hidden rather than completely deleted in Moodle. Given all this, the risks are probably only minimally worse than the option to delete within Moodle itself.