How to extend Moodle reporting to get more useful and actionable reporting, including site wide reports and better filtering.

1. Extending Moodle Reporting
Jonathan Moore
Founder

2. Background and context
● Managed thousands of Moodle sites
● Managed millions of Moodle user accounts
● Over 10 years experience with Moodle
● Dozens of Moodle dev and reporting projects
● Tuning, scalability, and performance expert
● Author of Moodle Module Development

3. Things you need
●
Local Moodle Installer
– https://download.moodle.org/macosx/
– https://download.moodle.org/windows/
●
Thinking cap!

4. Why we have this workshop

5. Format / objectives
● Overview builtin reports
● Discuss pluses / minuses
● Brain storm report wishlist
● Play with some reporting tools
● Build a report
● Ask questions!
● Share your tips

6. Getting to know you
● How many new admins?
● How technical are you?
● Learn builtin reports or build reports?
● Does anyone know some SQL?

7. Getting to know you
● What are you hoping to learn today?
● What reports do you want?

8. Hands-on
● Multi-vote most popular report requests

9. Builtin Reports

10. Some of what's included
● Activity reports
● Config changes
● Course overview report
● Grades report
● Logs report

11. More reports
● Participation report
● User course completion
● Report user outline
● Report course access time log report
● Quiz report

12. Hands-on discussion
● What are strengths and weaknesses of builtin
reporting?

13. Strengths some thoughts
● Click level data
● Many built-in reports
● Self-service
● Contextual

14. Weaknesses some thoughts
● All things / one thing
– Dates
– Courses
– Users
● Not easily actionable
● No report builder

15. Hands-on
● Use the config changes report to find the latest
setting change on your Moodle site
● Look at the log report and select a filter to
narrow the results

16. Other sources for reports
● Module database
– Ad Hoc Reports
– Configurable Reports
– Other specialty reports
●
3rd
Party reporting tool
● Ad hoc report list – Link
● Write a SQL query
● Write in PHP (development)

17. Configurable reports
– Extra pre-built reports
– Basic report builder
– SQL reports

18. Hands-on
● Install Configurable Reports
● Add the block
● Add a report

19. Some database / reporting tools
● PHPMyAdmin
● Adminer
● Crystal reports
● Jaspersoft
● MS Access
● Excel
● MySQL Workbench / Sequel Pro

20. MyODBC
 Windows client software
 Connect MySQL to desktop applications
 Make ad hoc reports in MS Access, Excel,
Open Office, etc.

21. PHPMyAdmin
● PHP program
● Database access tool
● Quick-and-dirty one-off reporting
● Examine database structure

22. Hands-on
● Go into PHPMyAdmin
● Find the table that stores user information
● Find the field that stores first name
● Find table that stores courses
● Find field that stores course short name
● Use the search feature

23. Ad Hoc Reporting List
● URL http://bit.ly/1fHQmhU
● Wiki of contributed SQL reports for Moodle
● Great place to find reports
● Fairly easy to tweak to make your own
● Be sure to vet accuracy of reports used
● Anyone can edit the wiki

24. Hands-on
● Select an interesting Ad Hoc Report
● Go to Configurable Reports
● Create a custom SQL report
● Paste in report SQL
● View report

25. Misc Techniques

26. Steal a similar report!
● Edit my.cnf
– general_log = on
– general_log_file=/usr/log/general.logmysql
config for query logging
● Go to builtin report page
● Restart mysql
● Refresh report
● Disable setting

27. Build a report with SQL
● Structured Query Language
● Powerful
● Flexible
● Complex for novices
● Can be dangerous
● Use a testing server

28. Basic sequel query
● Select firstname, lastname from mdl_user;

29. Limiting results with where
● Select firstname, lastname from mdl_user
where lastname = 'Moore';

30. Managing time / date stamps
● FROM_UNIXTIME( date_field, 'format_string')

32. Join course and course category
● Select * from mdl_courses c
JOIN mdl_course_categories ccat ON
c.category = ccat.id;

33. Hands-on
● Make most popular report request(s
● Either whole group / small group if enough SQL
experts

34. What we do
● Expert advice and eLearning program review
● Evangelism and training
● Instructional design
● Custom development
● Reporting
● System tuning
● Performance assessment

35. Questions?
● http://elearningconsultancy.com
● jonathan@elearningconsultancy.com
● Twitter: @moorejon
● Skype: moorejon07