1. There is a new admin setting to control whether this feature is
enabled. The admin can set the auto-save frequency to 1, 2 or 5 minutes,
or disable it.
2. When autosave is enabled, there is code in the quiz that monitors the
main quiz form, and does an ajax save call at the given frequency when
changes are being made by the student.
3. The ajax saves go to a new script that calls the question engine to
do the work.
4. To avoid simultaneous autosave + submit and finish, the auto-save
system shuts down shortly before time expires in a timed quiz.
1. Autosave works in some ways just like a normal save. We ultimately
call $behaviour->process_save() to do the work, and create a new step to
hold the data.
2. However, we come in through a completely different route through the
API, starting with separate auto-save methods. This keeps the auto-save
changes mostly separate, and so reduced the chance of breaking existing
working code.
3. When the time comes to store the auto-save step in the database, we
save it using a negative sequence number.
This is a clever trick that not only distinguises these steps, but also
avoids unique key errors when an auto-save and a real action happen
simultaneously. (There are unit tests for these tricky edge cases.)
4. When we load the data back from the database, most of the time the
auto-save steps are loaded back as if they were a real save, and so the
auto-saved data is used when the question is then rendered.
5. However, before we process another action, we remove the auto-saved
step, so it does not appear in the final history.
1. Split the question_attempt tests into one class per file.
2. Imporve the API to give tests more control, and to test more of the
important code. Some of this is not used here, but it is about to be.
It seems that formslib, for repetition, relies in the type
especified by the main (non existent at the end) element, instead
of assingning a type to each repetition.
Surely a result of storing types apart from elements. :-(
With the patch, detectMissingSetType() will detect
repeated elements (name containing '[') and will
perform the verification against that main element type.
