Accessing questions in other books

[Barbara Ericson]

I am working on the move to PreText for Python for Everybody - Interactive.  I can't copy my assignments from one ebook to another.  I can create new assignments and search for questions in other ebooks in the assignment builder interface.  This works well for my Peer Instruction assignments.  It doesn't work for lecture assignments that use a select question to allow students to choose which problem to work on out of two or to use one problem to scaffold them on the other.  Can we modify the select question to work even if the question is in a different ebook?  What do people think?

[Bradley Miller]

Barb,

It all comes down to identifiers.  In the old RST world, a question was uniquely identified by its “div_id” PLUS its base course.  We do not currently include the base course in the list of questions we pass to a select question. A simple div_id could be duplicated (and they are!) across many books, which would lead to some pretty random behavior of the select questions.

When we moved to PreTeXt  we made the decision to add the base course  PLUS the edition of the book to the identifier of each question.   py4eint_1_some_id  This ensures that question ids will be unique across the hundreds of books that are in the runestone database.  So for PreTeXt written books going across books will be easy and safe with selectquestions.  but in RST there are lots of places where the ids are duplicated.

Brad

Brad Miller
Professor Emeritus, Luther College
Founder, Runestone Academy LTD
Blog: http://reputablejournal.com

Set up a time to meet with me.

On May 26, 2026, at 2:51 PM, Barbara Ericson <barb...@umich.edu> wrote:

I am working on the move to PreText for Python for Everybody - Interactive.  I can't copy my assignments from one ebook to another.  I can create new assignments and search for questions in other ebooks in the assignment builder interface.  This works well for my Peer Instruction assignments.  It doesn't work for lecture assignments that use a select question to allow students to choose which problem to work on out of two or to use one problem to scaffold them on the other.  Can we modify the select question to work even if the question is in a different ebook?  What do people think?

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[Barbara Ericson]

We could modify what we pass to a select question to include the base book.  When we create a select question in the new assignment builder we give it the name of the question.  It could give us a list of questions with that name, show us the basebook as well, and let us preview the question.  We could select the one we want in the select questoin.

I don't see how a select question is any different from creating any assignment.  We can currently search for any question in any ebook and add it to an assignment.  This works great for Peer Instruction assignments.  It also works for creating a select question, but it just doesn't work when you preview the select question if it isn't from the same base book.

[Bradley Miller]

A select question is very different because we use the question name as a parameter to the component and then we resolve what question to show the student the first time they view the question.  That is very different than cementing what question will be seen when you are making the assignment.

I would much prefer to keep the parameters to the questions backward compatible, but ease the restriction on the same base course when we are confident that the name is the unique identifier for the question.  This can be done by moving to PreTeXt or by updating old questions in a question bank to ensure their ids are unique across all books.

Brad

Sent from my iPad

On May 29, 2026, at 13:09, Barbara Ericson <barb...@umich.edu> wrote:

We could modify what we pass to a select question to include the base book.  When we create a select question in the new assignment builder we give it the name of the question.  It could give us a list of questions with that name, show us the basebook as well, and let us preview the question.  We could select the one we want in the select questoin.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext-dev/4ef03a22-a93c-477f-95fe-760ab67fee01n%40googlegroups.com.