Moodle schema changes? - sql

Question

With a recent upgrade to Moodle 2.7, a customer of ours is reporting their CustomSQL reports are failing. For example, this query used to report gradeable items, but fails now:
SELECT
u.firstname AS "First",
u.lastname AS "Last",
c.fullname AS "Course",
a.name AS "Assignment"
FROM prefix_assignment_submissions AS asb
JOIN prefix_assignment AS a ON a.id = asb.assignment
JOIN prefix_user AS u ON u.id = asb.userid
JOIN prefix_course AS c ON c.id = a.course
JOIN prefix_course_modules AS cm ON c.id = cm.course
WHERE asb.grade < 0 AND cm.instance = a.id
AND cm.module = 1
ORDER BY c.fullname, a.name, u.lastname
A quick query or two to the DB shows there are zero rows in prefix_assignment_submissions and prefix_assignment. Suggestions?

Answer 1

The assignment module was replaced by the assign module in Moodle 2.2.
The old assignment module was disabled by default in Moodle 2.5 (I think) and removed completely in Moodle 2.7.
The query will need rewriting to use the assign_submissions table (and any other assign_* tables that are relevant).

Answer 2

I don't have a complete answer for you, but I can tell you that I also admin a Moodle 2.7 system, and my prefix_assignment_submissions table also has no records.
Additionally, I can give you the below query that I wrote to report on course final grades. We use this query for retention modeling through the semester, and for importing final grades to our student information system at the end of each term, where the idnumber in the mdl_course table will always match the course code followed by the year/term code in our student information system. I think it might be helpful because of how it uses the mdl_grade_items table: there are more itemtypes in that table than just course. In this table, an ungraded item would have a NULL value in the finalgrade field. Unfortunately, I don't know the Moodle internals enough to guarantee there will be a record in this table for every assignment, but it's a starting place.
SELECT u.username,u.lastname, u.firstname,c.shortname, left(c.idnumber, character_length(c.idnumber)-6) AS crs_cde,
right(c.idnumber,5) as yearterm,cast((gg.finalgrade/case when gi.grademax = 0 then 1 else gi.grademax end) * 100 as numeric(5,2)) finalgrade,
(SELECT l.letter
FROM mdl_context x
INNER JOIN mdl_grade_letters l ON l.contextid = x.id
WHERE x.instanceid in (c.id, 0) and l.lowerboundary <= round((gg.finalgrade/case when gi.grademax = 0 then 1 else gi.grademax end)*100,2)
ORDER BY x.id desc, lowerboundary desc limit 1) letter
FROM mdl_grade_grades gg
INNER JOIN mdl_grade_items gi ON gi.id=gg.itemid
INNER JOIN mdl_user u ON u.id=gg.userid
INNER JOIN mdl_course c on c.id = gi.courseid
INNER JOIN mdl_course_categories c2 on c2.id = c.category
WHERE gi.itemtype='course' and c2.visible = 1 and gg.finalgrade is not null
and char_length(c.idnumber) > 0 and right(c.idnumber,5)='20151';
We moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL when we updated to 2.7, but the only changes I needed to make to our queries were for date handling.
It's also worth mentioning that the assignment module was completely overhauled for version 2.3, and a lot of the docs for 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, etc were just copied over from the prior version. I've seen other changes be missed by this process. This especially holds for something like a contributed report. It's possible you're still seeing sql that hasn't been valid since 2.3.