[LON-CAPA-users] portfolio space questions

Stuart Peter Raeburn lon-capa-users@mail.lon-capa.org
Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:55:03 -0400


Jay, 

> On the contrary, it seems like any student can access any file, even 
> though I limited access to certain files via username. But could be I'm 
> just doing something wrong.

This suggests that public access has been enabled for the files as well as 
conditional name-based access. 

Unfortunately there is a bug in the current version of LON-CAPA which 
prevents access being granted to a user to view a file even though the file 
has conditional access correctly set for the user's username/domain.  So, if 
conditional user-based access is the only access control which applies for a 
file no students will have access to the file. The fix is available in the 
LON-CAPA CVS source repository, and will be included in the next release 
(whether that is a 2.3.4 - a bug-fix release for 2.3, or the next major 
release - 2.4). 

When the fix is in place - if you want to restrict access to a file to a 
single student using name-based conditional access to portfolio files you'd 
need to:
(a) Disable public access
(b) Enable conditional access based on username/domain for each file. 

An alternative solution which you can use right now (without the patch), 
makes use of groups and the file repository feature of groups, instead of 
files in your personal portfolio space, to which you grant conditional 
access to other users. 

Using the groups approach you would create a separate group for each of the 
individual students, and only include the file repository tool for use by 
the group member.  In addition you would not enable any of the optional 
privileges (upload, modify, delete, comtrol access), so that the only action 
available to the member of the group would be to retrieve any files you have 
uploaded to the groups' repository.).  As Course Coordinator you have access 
to all file repository privileges in every group (allowing you to upload 
files). 

One advantage of this approach over using your personal portfolio space, and 
setting access controls, would be that the files would be associated with 
the course.  Another is that you would not need to set access controls each 
time you uploaded another file for a particular user.  Once the groups were 
set up, you would just upload additional files intended for specific users 
to their corresponding groups.   A further advantage is that the groups link 
will appear in the inline navigation bar, allowing students easy access to 
the files you are distributing, when they are logged into the course.  
Unfortunately the group creation process involves multiple screens (to 
support diverse potential uses of groups).  It would be desirable in the 
future to provide an interface that would allow one or two-click creation of 
this type of one-person groups for all users in a course. 

Group memberships resemble roles in one way - a user must log-in again after 
a new group memebership has been assigned to them in order for the group to 
be listed and accessible from within the corresponding course, once the user 
has selected a student (or other) role in the course. 

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group 

> On the contrary, it seems like any student can access any file, even 
> though I limited access to certain files via username. But could be I'm 
> just doing something wrong. 
>
> Jay 
>
>> Hrrm, odd in what way is it failing to work? Student's can't access it?