[LON-CAPA-admin] Some questions

[Stuart Raeburn]

Eric,

Question 1:

If a particular student is already enrolled in a course, currently the  
auto-enrollment process will only modify the user if:

(a) The student was "manually" enrolled in the course (in this case,  
type gets changed from "manual" to auto)

or

(b) The student switched sections.

In either (a) or (b), differences between any of: first name, last  
name, middle name, or permanent e-mail address will result in an  
update of the data stored centrally in LON-CAPA (and also in the  
LON-CAPA course roster for the specific course) to match the values  
included for the student in the course roster XML file. Note: if the  
same student is also enrolled in other courses in LON-CAPA, user  
information such as first name will _not_ be updated in the rosters  
for those other courses.  This is a feature requested by instructors.

If user information was changed you'll see a message in  
/home/httpd/perl/logs/autoenroll.log:
"User information updated for user: $username prior to enrollment."

If the user is not enrolled in the course then enrollment will occur  
and user information will be updated centrally in the system (if the  
user already exists in LON-CAPA, and there is a mismatch between  
information in the system and information in the course roster XML  
file).

If you want to keep user information (first name, middle name, last  
name etc.) for students synchronized across all course rosters, you'll  
need to use the Autoupdate feature.  The Domain Coordinator has fairly  
granular control over which types of user information is updated, and  
for which types of institutional user (e'g., faculty, staff or  
students).  However, to use Autoupdate,    
/home/httpd/lib/perl/localenroll.pm needs to be customized to (a)  
define institutional types, and (b) establish a conduit to  
institutional directory information (of which LDAP is one example).  I  
can assist with this on request.

Question 2:

The web form on the log-in page does not impose a character length on  
passwords, and  neither does the client-side encryption mechanism.  In  
practice, there is a limit for internally authenticated users, but for  
Kerberos or locally authenticated users this is not the case (unless  
those systems themselves impose constraints).  As VCU is using local  
authentication (via an interface to LDAP) there would not be a  
character limit from the LON-CAPA side.

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group

Quoting Eric Harvey/FS/VCU <teharvey at vcu.edu>:

> Questions..
>
> #1:
> We're having a problem with auto-enrollments where a user's first name may
> be missing during user creation.
> It appears that this corrects itself when the proper/corrected data comes
> through from our SIS and the roster XML file gets updated.
> The auto-enrollment feature in LC doesn't pick up on this update....
>
> We currently don't have the auto-update feature turned on (I was thinking
> it was reserved only for updates from LDAP).
> Would this, in fact, re-read the roster file and update the user record if
> we turned it on? If not, is there another way to do this?
>
> #2:
> Is there a set character length on the password field at login?
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> Eric Harvey
> VCU Learning Systems
> (804)828-8595
>