Query for dialogue to support global search

[Lina-LI-Na]

Hi Troy. Many thanks for providing this plugin to the community; its functionality is really appreciated by our staff and students, and we’re really grateful to you for your efforts to maintain and update it.

On that note, please could I quickly query whether you have any plans to update the plugin to be fully compatible with Moodle v3.1, and its new Global Search feature in particular? To clarify: while we’ve tested the Dialogue plugin under v3.1 and all of the core functionality seems to work fine, we’ve found that instances of the activity are not searchable via v3.1’s Global Search feature. Please see the following screenshot for details, which lists all of the available areas that can searched under v3.1 (note that these settings are available via: Site Administration -> Plugins -> Search -> Manage Global Search):

http://imgur.com/lWWQByE

Note also that the above screenshot was taken on a v3.1 system where the Dialogue plugin is installed and available. However, as you can see, the Dialogue activity is not listed as being available to be searched. Obviously, this is likely to be a significant problem/cause of confusion for users who might want to search for specific instances of the Dialogue activity across Moodle.

I’m not a developer, but my understanding is that mod plugins can be made searchable relatively easily via the addition of a new search class within the plugin’s codebase (located at ../classes/search/activity.php). Please see the following for further details:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=334938
https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Global_search
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Search_API

We really hope this search capability can be added to Dialogue as I’m sure it would be a huge benefit to our users (as well as those of other v3.1 systems) and, again, many thanks for all your efforts to develop this plugin and share it with the community.

Best wishes,
Lina

[troywilliams]

Hi Lina,

I will have a look next week at what needs to be done to get plugin 3.1 compatible... not including global search functionality :-( Those are core plugins supporting global search. The global search will be great feature to add to dialogue module but some time needs to spent investigating/learning the new search API. I want to make sure a person's posts aren't searchable by other people as the the dialogue module is build around a private conversation between two people. Will keep this open as a new feature request for global search functionality :-)

Regards,

Troy

[Lina-LI-Na]

Hi Troy,
Thanks for your reply. To our teachers and students, it will be good enough if the title and the description of the dialogue can be searchable. We really appreciate your great contributions.
We will be looking forward to the new release of dialogue plugin.
Best wishes,
Lina

[danmarsden]

#113 should fix this.