10 March 2017, 11:46

Hello!

Using Mahara 16.10.

All my users belong first to a main institution (which have a low quota)

Then can then ask their membership to more institutions (which have more interesting quotas).

I experienced that when a user become member of a supplementary institution, its quota remains unchanged. It changes if the secondary institution administrator forces the quota refresh for all the secondary institution members.

But if the main institution administrator forces then a quota refresh too, the user retrieve the initial low quota.

Could it be possible to configure quota affectation so that the quota assigned to a user would be the higher quota of the institutions of which he belongs?

Or, maybe so that the quota assigned to a user is the sum of institutions quotas for which he belongs? 

Best regards,

Stéphanie

13 March 2017, 9:52

Hello Stéphanie,

That is an interesting problem with multiple institutions. We haven't run into this yet because typically, the institutions on our multi-institution sites have the same quota in the institutions. ;-)

When a user gets created, she is created in one institution and thus takes on the quota from that institution. That doesn't change even when she is added to other institutions. But then when a quota change is made, all members of the institution are updated, i.e. also this user no matter what her "primary" institution is. Mahara doesn't know the concept of "primary" institution. An institution is always the default one but that is just because it's either the first one or the one lowest in the alphabet.

I suspect that the quota doesn't follow rules we put into Mahara over the last few years (e.g. for online users, public pages) that it determines the most permissible setting. There are most likely a few more of these settings.

The quota is an interesting problem though: If we applied the logic we have in other places, would the quota change directly when a user is added to a new institution? What if he's removed? Would there be a notification for the user that they'd go down to a lower quota? What if they stored more files than the lower quota allows?

Cheers

Kristina

14 March 2017, 3:47

Hi Kristina,

My question about this quota behavior occurs in a context where I want everyone who has a valid account in our university Active Directory can successfully log into Mahara (via SAML).

But I would like those users to have a minimal quota until they become member of a supplementary institution, let's say to their « Faculty » institution.

Yes, I think too that it this quota fine tuning thing, if it had to be implemented, is not so straightforward and comes with a lot of considerations.

All the best,

Stéphanie