File Size of Course?

[Nathan Lounds]

We would like to calculate the size of a course, well, actually the size of the file generated by doing a course export.  There is a file size limit for import, so we want to direct people to a different action if their course is too large.

Anybody have any thoughts about this?  If I wanted to try to go about this, how might I get started?

Thanks!

[Desire2Learn Staff: Viktor]

Hey Nathan,

There's no API call that you can use to gather the size a course would require on export without actually exporting it; I take it that selecting exemplar courses already existing in your LMS, exporting them, and then using those file-sizes as general guidelines, is not what you're looking for?

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Viktor

[Nathan Lounds]

Thanks for the info, Viktor.  We want to make our large course copy tool responsive to the size of the course.  We'd like to be able to tell users to use the regular methods if there course is small enough.  But it doesn't sound like that is possible, at least not using Valence.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Viktor]

I suspect you could make a really rough evaluation by traversing the content tree for the course to copy, and finding the number of content topic nodes that are of "type file" topic (with uploaded file data), rather than the number that are simply link type topics. You could also do simple parsing of all the content topics that are URLs that end in some extension other than HTML, and are thus assumed to be binary data, and most probably larger than simple HTML content. This might not at all be accurate, but it might be a useful rough filter.