** Using WeBWorK **

I just ran into Bug 1133 however I am a little unclear on which file I should modify. [note: Bug 1133 essentially gives you a warning every time "submit answer" is clicked because WW 2.3 has some relative path issues]

You say in the bug report: <quote>

OK. I think I have it. There is an error in the global.conf.dist

# The transaction log contains data from each recorded answer submission. This
# is useful if the database becomes corrupted.
$webworkFiles{logs}{transaction}    = "$courseDirs{logs}/transaction.log";

The mismatch is that as currently defined the "transaction" logging facility is expected to be under the webworkDirs, not the courseDirs. The quick fix for now is to change courseDirs{logs} to webworkDirs{logs}.

Hopefully that will work. </quote>

I just want to be clear. Am I supposed to correct global.conf or global.conf.dist? I do not really understand CVS and so I am not sure of what the big difference between * and *.dist are (if they have anything to do with CVS at all).

Also, I am running into a related (?) issue. When I click the "grades" link under the Main Menu, I get a list of grades in a table and then some warnings underneath. Is this a bug or do I have some permissions set incorrectly?

Here are the errors (this is for a student with no permissions):

Failed to open scoring file '/opt/webwork/courses/modelCourse-math240/scoring/report_grades_data.csv' for reading: No such file or directory

Call stack

The information below can help locate the source of the problem.

* in WeBWorK::File::Scoring::parse_scoring_file called at line 1962 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator.pm
* in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::read_scoring_file called at line 96 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator/Grades.pm
* in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::Grades::scoring_info called at line 53 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator/Grades.pm
* in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::Grades::body called at line 152 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/Template.pm
* in WeBWorK::Template::template called at line 480 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator.pm
* in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::content called at line 188 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator.pm
* in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::go called at line 338 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK.pm

Thanks in advance, Brian

<| Post or View Comments |>

Correct global.conf. Eventually we will figure out a permanent fix ( my vote is to move the log files so that they are stored under each course separately -- or else do more extensive modifications to the log writing subroutine so that one can choose on a course by course basis). When that happens we'll distribute the new "standard" configuration in global.conf.dist.

Whenever you update via CVS you will want to check changes in global.conf.dist and database.conf.dist etc. to see if you want to move those changes over to your local course. Because you have made local configuration choices in global.conf, database.conf etc. we don't want those choices automatically overridden when you update from CVS. You'll need to transfer any changes you think appropriate by hand.

Your second problem is a cosmetic bug (and a new one in the latest release) but your students can ignore it for now. The error message used to appear more friendly -- just indicating that you had not yet added any additional grades (besides the ones generated by WeBWorK).

I'll report the bug.

-- Mike

<| Post or View Comments |>

Changing my global.conf worked wonders. Thanks :)

Also, for the cosmetic problem, I have created an empty file called "report_grades_data.csv" in the scoring directory and that gets rid of the error messages. I guess I need to put this file in my modelCourse so that when I create courses from this template, the file is always there.

This works for now. I am mostly concerned about students reactions when they go to see their grades and they see a bunch of errors at the bottom. I am sure this will cause some students to be somewhat uneasy (!) about how they are doing.

Brian

<| Post or View Comments |>

<| Post or View Comments |>

For anyone needing a script to place multiple copies of a blank .csv file, I did the following. First, create a blank file called "report_grades_data.csv" (use vi, emacs, or whatever). I placed this file in the /opt/webwork/courses directory and then did the following:

$ cd /opt/webwork/courses
$ for each in /opt/webwork/courses/*/scoring; do ( cp report_grades_data.csv $each ) done

Also, here is another piece of information about this empty file "report_grades_data.csv" that I placed in the courses/scoring directory.

Today I went to create a simple email to send to a class with their student ID's (i.e. distributing their initial passwords as $SID). But the mail failed to send. Here is the error that I got:

No merge data file

Can't read merge file None. No message sent

I had not selected a merge file (not sure why I needed to really). But I noticed that in the drop down menu for "merge file" was listed the blank .csv file that I put in the scoring directory. So I decided to select it and send again (since it was the only option that I could select other than "None").

This time the email went through fine. Not sure how this is related but I thought it was interesting.

By the way, it does not seem to make a difference whether I try to send email only to selected students or to the whole class.

Thoughts?

<| Post or View Comments |>

$ cd /opt/webwork/courses
$ for each in /opt/webwork/courses/*/scoring; do ( cp report_grades_data.csv $each ) done

Use caution, this will replace any existing report_grades_data.csv file. You might want to add the -i switch to the cp command so you'll at least be prompted.
-sam

<| Post or View Comments |>