Announcing CodeRunner v3.6.0

Announcing CodeRunner v3.6.0

by Richard Lobb -
Number of replies: 0

CodeRunner v3.6.0

The latest version of CodeRunner, v3.6.0 (30 January 2019) is now available on github. The two most important changes are:

  1. Student Attachments. Question authors can optionally allow students to attach extra files to their submissions. You can control how many files are allowed and/or required, specify a regular expression that uploaded filenames must match and set an upper limit on file size. The attachment files are loaded into the run-time working directory on Jobe when the task is run. You can check what files students have attached through the {{ ATTACHMENTS }} template parameter. This feature is still marked experimental; please let me know of any issues you find. Also see the note on the new version of Jobe, below.
  2. Forced display or hiding of CodeRunner feedback. To allow CodeRunner questions to be used in quizzes that are not using Adaptive mode behaviour, you can now force display of the CodeRunner result table regardless of the selected behaviour. A Feedback dropdown in the question author form sets the desired behaviour of each question (Force hide, Force show, Use quiz default).

The full change log is as follows:

30 January 2018. v3.6.0

  • Add a new experimental feature that allows students to attach files to their submissions. The attached files are loaded into the working directory during the run.
  • Add a *Feedback* dropdown to the question authoring form that allows the question author to display or hide the result table regardless of the behaviour mode chosen for the quiz.
  • Fix bug in missing prototype error message (extraneous junk included, due to an exception being thrown). 
18 November 2018. 3.5.3+

  • Bug fix: answerbox preloads of greater than ~1k generated debugging error messages (if developer-level messages were enabled). Thanks Tim Hunt.
  • Bug fix: Twig-all was not being applied to the question's General Feedback.
  • Improve handling of a failed unserialise of a legacy question attempt, which can (rarely) occur if a complete course, including student activity attempts, is moved between sites with different Moodle versions or database charsets.
  • Improve handling of Twig errors when editing questions that use TwigAll in conjunction with ValidateOnSave.

A new version of Jobe

A new version of Jobe, v1.6.0, is also available on github. You should consider upgrading your Jobe server in due course if you think heavy use will be made of student file attachments. The old Jobe server caches uploaded files indefinitely so performance might degrade over time as the number of files grows and disk space might also run out. The new Jobe server has a hierarchical file cache that should provide faster access with very large numbers of files and also includes a cache cleaner that kicks in if free disk space falls before 5%. This upgrade is not a high priority unless you think server will handle a large number of attachments and/or very large attachments. You may wish to defer any upgrade until you experience actual problems or you need to upgrade for other reasons, e.g. a more recent base OS.