29 April 2011, 3:10

Hello all,

Maybe I am restarting an old discussion here but I could not find it exactly in the forums. I have been looking at the communication between Moodle and Mahara so to say, and found some inconsistencies:

• The user sample logs in to Moodle, and uses the XMLRPC to login on Mahara. He then logs out on Moodle, but he remains logged in on Mahara
• The user sample logs in to Moodle, and uses the XMLRPC to login on Mahara. He then logs out on Mahara, which -also- causes him to log out on Moodle

Note that this is kind of counter-intuitive (I would have found that the other way around would make more sense). However this is probably not a big issue, but:

• An admin removes the account sample from Mahara. Later, the sample user logs in to Moodle and uses XMLRPC to go to Mahara. He does not get a message stating that his account was deleted, but instead a new account is created for him. So deletion causes all files and views/pages to get removed, but does not prevent the user from accessing Mahara.
• An admin removes the account sample from Moodle. Later, a new account is created in Moodle by a new user, coincidentially also with the username sample. This -new- user uses the XMLRPC link to login on Mahara and finds there the old files and views from the previous user!

In other words, deletion of an account under Moodle does not cause it to get removed under Mahara and vice versa. Especially in the last case the possible consequences are unwanted.

What my question is: is this behaviour intended? If so, what is the reasoning behind this behaviour? If not, are there any plans to change this and to what?

Best regards

PS: We are running Moodle 2.0.1+ (Build: 20101229), Mahara 1.3.3 (yes these are a bit outdated)

01 May 2011, 17:02

Hi Bart, from what I remember the unwanted behaviour you mention in the last case happens because the Moodle username is the only thing available on the Mahara side to identify Moodle users.  I don't think Moodle passes the user id along, so Mahara has to assume that user sample coming from a particular host is the same user every time.

It would be good if deleting an account on the Moodle side sent some kind of notification to Mahara which could be used to either delete the Mahara account, or just change the Mahara account's auth method to internal, but no one's implemented that as far as I know.