** Using WeBWorK **

Hi John,

If I've understood you correctly what you want to do is create a new problem. Suppose you have created a new homework set. And have added (1) "blank" problem to the homework set.

Edit the blank problem (the pencil icon).

Click on the tab "NewVersion"

Fill out the (relative to the TMPL directory) path to the file

Choose to replace the current (blankproblem.pg) problem

Click "Take action"

If you can either replace an existing problem in the homework set, or append a problem onto the end of the set or you can save a free standing file which you can later attach to a homework set.

If you want to use your own editor take a look at the file webwork2/clients/sendXMPRPC.pl https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/blob/master/clients/sendXMLRPC.pl . I use that with bbedit or vim to write collections of problems. I usually find the web interface quicker for bug fixing and minor updates.

There is pretty good POD documentation at the top of the file, but I will be happy to answer further questions in this thread.

Look in the Contrib section of the webwork library. There are a lot of differential equations problems that haven't yet been curated. Others may have specific suggestions of where to look.

-- Mike

I think the most common way is to make your way to that problem editor (say by finding an existing problem and clicking to edit it) and then clear the screen (or perhaps clear most but preserve structural elements). Then understanding the View, New Version, Append, and Revert tabs becomes important. You could use the New Version tab to define a file path and name for your new file. And after that, either use the View tab to compile the problem without saving, or keep using the New Version tab. Either way, clicking "Take Action" compiles the problem in a new tab.

(Append is like New Version, but adds the problem to an existing set. Revert is for when you have used View already, thereby creating a temporary file, and you want to trash that and go back to the last permanently saved version.)

If you edit from the server with your favorite text editor, you could separately view the output in a web browser as follows. The file should be in some course's templates/ folder (or have a file path within the templates/ folder). So for example:

vim /opt/webwork/courses/mycourse/templates/myproblem.pg

Then with a web browser, use an address like this:

https://webwork.mydomain.edu/webwork2/html2xml?&problemSeed=1&answersSubmitted=0&sourceFilePath=myproblem.pg&displayMode=MathJax&courseID=mycourse&userID=myuser&course_password=mypassword&outputformat=simple

In that URL, you should customize:

webwork.mydomain.edu

myproblem.pg (this could also be a file path like myproblems/myproblem.pg)

mycourse

myuser (some user account with at least login_proctor permissions)

mypassword (the password for that user)

Note that I would avoid using your actual professor level user account and password for this, since it would be too easy for that URL to accidentally be sent to a colleague or something, and you forget that it reveals your password.