Feature Request: "Release all submissions" button in groups

[Allie Davidson]

It would be very useful for group administrators and tutors to be able to press a "release all submissions" button within a group. Many instructors that I have spoken to prefer to grade all students' portfolios but wait to release them until they have had a chance to mark all portfolios. Right now what group admins and tutors end up doing is after marking all the portfolios in a group they have to go back into each portfolio individually to press the "Release" button. This is time consuming and a nuisance to have to do with larger classes.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

See https://wiki.mahara.org/wiki/Developer_Area/Specifications_in_Development/Scheduled_Bulk_Feedback for more information on the bigger feature.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Allie, I guess bug#1242464 would also be useful for you?

[Matt Di Giuseppe (matthew-digiuseppe)]

I have something to add to Allie's feature request: there may need to be some changes to the "export_process_queue" CRON task that archives submissions before they are released.

All of our courses (groups) are configured to archive submissions before release, so while the export_process_queue CRON task was processing about 150 collections (600 pages), PHP encountered a max_run_time error, and stopped the task partway through, so some were archived, but none were released.

The export_process_queue task locks itself when it starts and cannot be run again until it has finished, but if it crashes it does not unlock.

So for about 36 hours after this task crashed, anything that was flagged for release just said "Pending release after archiving" and nothing happened. I had to go into the config table in the database and deleted the lock, and clear out the export queue.

So this potential error will need to be handled in some way, otherwise it will probably happen a lot more often if an entire class can be flagged for archiving & release all at once. 150 collections was only 1/4 of the class.

[Allie Davidson (allie-davidson)]

Thanks for the links, Kristina.

One more thing to add to the bulk release feature: it would be really helpful for group admins/tutors to be able to select particular portfolios that they do not want be released during the bulk release action. For example, a student may have been given an extension on their portfolio and the instructor has not marked it yet but they would like to release all of the other students' portfolios.

Ideally there would be a select/un-select/select all option and then the admin/tutor could bulk-release the selected portfolios.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Thank you for the report, Matt. Since this is more of a bug than part of this feature request, I reported it separately at bug #1557160.

Allie, good point. I added your suggestion to the wiki page.