[LON-CAPA-users] Changing published problems

[Guy Albertelli II]

Hi Lars,

> We have some published problems with several questions in the same 
> problem part. I want to split these problems up in more parts, so
> that there is only one question per part. My question concerns the 
> "id" attribute that apparently has been added to the parts when the
> problem was published the first time. What do I do with these id's as I
> split the problem into more parts?

# ids Must NOT contain spaces or _ or . or :

(actually I think 1.0 will allow spaces, but I haven't completely
tested everything yet.)

# Must be unique in this problem.

# Changing the ID for previously published problems can make students
appear to lose credit for this part of the problem, if you use the new
version in the course.

If I was splitting problems up like this, I would probably use all new
part ids, but nothing will go wrong as long as the above warnings are
heeded.


> In this regard, it bothers a little that something I didn't put in the
> problem (the id attribute, more?), is added when the problem is 
> published: The problem is no longer my problem as originally published... 
> How are authors supposed to deal with this? Is this documented?

Yep it is documented. The indepth document on the homework tags talks
about ids being required and that they are added if not specfied at
publication. Additionally a log file is generated for every
publication, and it mentions if it has to modify and tags to add ids
in it.

Lon-CAPA tries to walk a line between being as acceptive as possible of
any HTML while yet trying to build on top of HTML. Additionally
Lon-CAPA tries make things as easy as possible for people to create
things, but still allow fine control over every aspect to those who
want to control it.

You can change the Part ids to whatever you want using the Edit or
EditXML interfaces, and Lon-CAPA will use those values and not modify
them. It only adds them if they didn't already exist.

I can see that it might be useful to add a 'Prepare For Publication'
button that does all of the Publication checks and updates without
acutally Publishing. (This actually currently exists, when you click
on 'Publish' or 'Publish this Resource' the prepublication checks and
updates occur and then you are shown the Metadata query screen, when
you click on 'Finalize Publication' nothing occurs except that the
file is copied into publication space. So you can think of the
'Publish' button as really 'Prepare For Publication' and then
'Finalize Publication' as the real 'Publish')

-- 
guy@albertelli.com  LON-CAPA Developer  0-7-6-9-