LON-CAPA Help
An auto-update, run as a regular process, can update user information
stored in LON-CAPA for all users in a domain, for whom institutional
directory information is available. Which user records are updated
can be controlled by institutional status (e.g., Faculty, Staff, Student
etc.). If a user is affiliated with more than one group, then the attributes
which can be updated will be the cumulative set for the different
groups to which the user belongs.
If users are not affiliated with any institutional group, they can
be accommodated within the default "Other users"
group which is provided automatically. If no status types are defined
for your domain, this default group is entitled "All users".
Settings for auto-update are:
- Set auto-update as active or inactive in the domain.
- Set whether user information changes should propagate to data stored
in classlist database files for the separate courses in which the
user has an active student role.
- Set whether to skip updates for users without active or future roles.
- Set whether to skip updates for users for whom the last modification
to the activity log is more than a specified threshold (in days), and the
time since the last role assignment change also exceeds the same threshold.
- Set whether users with a particular status (e.g., Faculty, Staff,
Student etc.) should have access to a user preference which permits them
to lock their existing user information, and disable automatic updates
of their own information, should it change in the institutional directory.
Note: this option is only shown if institutional groups have been defined.
- Set which of the following attributes: first name, middle name, last
name, generation, e-mail address, student/employee ID should be updated
within LON-CAPA if a different version to the one currently stored
is retrieved from the institutional directory.
In order for Autoupdate to work, the &allusers_info() routine in
localenroll.pm needs to be customized and a conduit established to
institutional data. In addition, if you wish to differentiate between
institutional user types in your LON-CAPA domain, you should define
those in the "Institutional user types" section of the
"Default authentication, language, timezone, portal, types"
domain configuration screen. The types you set should be consistent with the
types in use at your institution. These types are then used to populate
the "User population" column in each of the
"Updatable user information" row(s) in the
Auto-update data table in "Domain Configuration".
Warnings will be written to the Auto-update log file found in /home/httpd/perl/logs
if a possible username change is detected. Although the username is
the unique identifier in LON-CAPA, the student/employee ID operates
as an additional, mostly unique identifier. At present LON-CAPA does
not support username changes. For users who switch username (assuming
institutional authentication will no longer authenticate the user's
old username) the recommendation is to convert the authentication type
in LON-CAPA for the user to "internal", set an
initial password, make sure that permanent e-mail is set for the user,
then e-mail the user and ask them to use the
"Forgot password?" link on the log-in page
to change the password to something secure.