20 August 2013, 20:14

Hi there,

I'm stuck on, I think, the behaviour of user profile fields in a Moodle>Mahara MNet set-up.

My users access Moodle and then click a network servers block to access Mahara (v1.4.2). They are all in a single institution which uses the XMLRPC authentication plugin. The plugin is set to:

No parent authority
They SSO in
update user info on login
We auto-create users
We import content
There are no locked fields.

The "internal" authentication plugin is active (so that we can allow direct registration) but secondary to the XMLRPC one and my issue is with users authenticated via XMLRPC.

Generally, networking works (users can access Mahara from Moodle). Some user profile fields are correctly and understandably uneditable (e.g. first and last name - they are coming from Moodle).

My problem: when non-admin users go to Content...About me, their "Introduction" field is a blue label with "--" (two dashes) instead of the usual Rich Text box. I want users to be able to edit this field. Hint: Mahara site admin users (who also roam to Mahara from Moodle) can see the Introduction box correctly, however roaming institution admins cannot.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Tim

20 August 2013, 21:39

Hello Tim,

Your problem is easy to explain. It baffled me in the beginning as well, but it is logical. You ticked the box for "Update user info on login". This means that all profile fields that Mahara imports from Moodle are updated whenever the user logs in new. Having the two dashes in the introduction simply means that the users have not put a description into their Moodle profile. See #9 in the section http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.4/site_admin/institutions.html#mnet-xmlrpc-authentication for which profile fields are updated automatically when you have this box ticked.

So your users can change the content of the introduction section when you haven't locked it but the next time they log in, the empty content from Moodle will overwrite it.

I see two possibilities:

1. Don't update user info on login: This may not be so good if you wnat any other information updated. Unfortunately, the admin interface doesn't allow you to select which info you'd like to update.
2. Ask your users to populate their description in Moodle and treat their Moodle profile as their main profile.

Cheers

Kristina

21 August 2013, 1:38

Genius! Thanks very much Kristina, that's sorted it.

Best wishes,

Tim