Bug in Activity drop-down list for BLTI links?

[Kate Valenti]

It seems if you add a BLTI link with a title of “Lesson 1
Presentation” and then add “Lesson 2 Presentation”, the only item that
shows up in the “Add an activity” drop down list is “Lesson 2
Presentation”. It's as if the activity list dropdown doesn’t see the
numbers as a distinguishing title value.

I’ve tried these permutations (with both lesson 1 and lesson 2 at the
same time)

Lesson_1 Presentation
Presentation/Lesson_1
Presentation/Lesson_01
Lesson1 Presentation
Presentation.Lesson_01

And in all cases only one instance shows up in the activity drop down.

It looks like it's not just numbers, either. With these three:

Presentation_Lesson/2/a
Presentation.Lesson_a
Presentation_Lesson/1/

- Presentation.Lesson_a doesn't show up.


Does anyone know if this is a bug with the BLTI module, or with Moodle
in general?

Thanks,
Kate

[Nikolas Galanis]

Hi Kate,

This is a bug with BasicLTI and thanks for pointing it out.

What happens is that when defining a new external tool, a "raw" form of the tool's name is inserted in the DB. This form is later used in Moodle internally to recover the available tools. However, Moodle is kind of picky with special characters and spaces in the rawname field so we have to eliminate them.

As it stands now, the regular expresion we use for converting "name" to "rawname" is way too agressive (it eliminates anything not a-z or A-Z. This includes numbers, accented characters, symbols and spaces).

It is time we rethought that regular expresion for building the rawname. We will test and see exactly what Moodle does not like and we will have a patch out soon.

Thanks again,

Nikolas