[LON-CAPA-admin] Course Catalog

[Stuart Peter Raeburn]

Stefan, 

At present the course catalog link on the log-in page will list courses in 
the domain to which the machine belongs, which have institutional codes 
assigned to them. (If a logged-in user types the URL: 
[machine]/adm/coursecatalog, the catalog will be for the current role's 
domain,  or the user's domain - if the user has no role selected). 

The ability to assign institutional codes was originally introduced in 2004 
to support auto-enrollment for courses in domains with access to 
institutional classlist datafeeds.  Institutional codes can be assigned when 
a Domain Coordinator creates a new course via CCRS, and they can be modified 
for an existing course by a Domain Coordinator using MCRS. 

If /home/httpd/lib/perl/localenroll.pm has been customized appropriately, 
the course catalog will display an initial page which provides select boxes 
for the user to narrow the search, e.g., (at MSU): Year, Semester, 
Department, Number and a "Display courses" button - see 
http://s10.lite.msu.edu/adm/coursecatalog 

There are two subroutines in localenroll.pm which require customization - 
instcode_format() and instcode_defaults(). In the absence of customization, 
there will be not be an initial page with categories and a "display courses" 
button; instead the course catalog will simply display a list of all courses 
which have institutional codes, sorted by title (sort order can be changed 
by clicking the column headings). 

The comments included in the stub localenroll.pm file including in the 
LON-CAPA distribution provide information about how to customize the two 
routines.  I can also send you the complete code for these routines as 
implemented at MSU (for excerpts see below). 

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group 

P.S. If you are planning to customize localenroll.pm (on the library server 
for your domain): 

In short....
instcode_format() takes a reference to a hash of institutional courseIDs 
(where key is LON-CAPA courseID, e.g., 43551dedcd43febmsul, and value is 
institutional code, e.g., fs03nop590), and divides the institutional code 
into fragments - at MSU: year, semester, department and number.  The 
fragments are then accumulated for each of the categories. 

instcode_defaults() specifies the default regular expression fragments to be 
used to filter the display of courses based on the selections a user makes. 

For example ....
At MSU codes are similar to fs03nop590 where fs is semester (fs is Fall), 03 
is year, nop is department and 590 is course number. 

instcode_format() at MSU includes:
   foreach my $cid (keys %{$instcodes}) {
       if ($$instcodes{$cid} =~ m/^([suf]s)(\d{2})(\w{2,3})(\d{3,4}\w?)$/) { 
$$codes{$cid}{'Semester'} = $1;
           $$codes{$cid}{'Department'} = $3;
           $$codes{$cid}{'Number'} = $4;
           my $year = $2;
           my $numyear = $year;
           $numyear =~ s/^0//;
           $$codes{$cid}{'Year'} = $year;
           unless (defined($$cat_titles{'Year'}{$year})) {
               $$cat_titles{'Year'}{$year} = 2000 + $numyear;
           }
       }
   } 

The select boxes shown on the intial page of course catalog are:
Year, Semester, Department, Nunmber 

If a user selected 2003 and Fall from the select boxes, the regular 
expression used in filtering the course listing would be:
fs03\w{2,3}\d{3,4}\w? 

instcode_defaults() at MSU includes:
   %{$defaults} = (
       'Year' => '\d{2}',
       'Semester' => '^[sfu]s',
       'Department' => '\w{2,3}',
       'Number' => '\d{3,4}\w?',
   );
   @{$code_order} = ('Semester','Year','Department','Number'); 

Let me know if you would like more information on customizing 
instcode_format() and instcode_defaults().  Before doing so you will need 
decide on a scheme for institutional codes.  If you also plan to use 
auto-enrollment this may be influenced by the requirement to be able to 
access classlist datafeeds. 

Stefan Bisitz writes: 

> Hi, 
> 
> Which courses are listed in the "Course Catalog" (link from LON-CAPA
> login page)? How can I control, which courses are listed? On our server,
> I only find there three (very) old courses, which shouldn't be listed there. 
> 
> -> [machine]/adm/coursecatalog 
> 
> Thanks,
> Stefan 
> 
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