These new settings are designed to enchance user privacy surrounding
groups. They allow groups to be configured so that users outside the
group cannot see the group, so that users in the group cannot see each
other, or so that users cannot see the group at all, even if they are in
it. This avoids issues where a group may be assigned based on sensitive
personal information (such as a person requiring special arrangements
due to a disability).
By default, groups are visible to all and available for participation in
activities, which maintains the current behaviour.
For performance, a new cache has been added to track the number of
groups on a course that are not visible to non-members. This allows us
to revert to the existing behaviour if the new features are not being
used at all on a course, and only apply the new visibility conditions if
they are.
Users who have the moodle/course:viewhiddengroups capability should be
concious of exposing hidden groups when showing their screen to other
users. The "Switch role to..." feature can be used to show a course page
on screen without exposing private availability conditions, for example.
The changes cover several specific areas:
* grouplib functions, which most code should use to get lists of groups
and members (this includes the participants page).
* Activities supporting group overrides will not allow overrides for
groups that are hidden from all users.
* Activities supporting separate/visible groups modes will only allow
groups with the new "participation" flag enabled to be selected.
* Group messaging will be disabled for groups where members cannot see
each other, or cannot see the group at all.
This class would belong more appropriately within the 'user' API
(core_user) instead of within the 'core' API, since it is
directly related to user data.
Since the class has only just been added to Moodle, now is a good
time to move it.
In all cases changes have been kept to a minimum while not making
the code completely horrible. For example, there are many instances
where it would probably be better to rewrite a query entirely, but
I have not done that (in order to reduce the risk of changes).
1) Tidied up conditional check and put additional variable on new line.
2) Prevented change of the default behaviour for 'groups_get_potential_members()'.
3) Added another behat test.
MDL-45991 groups: Auto-create groups with ungrouped users only
When using auto-create groups, sometimes it is needed to only create
groups with users that are not already inside a course group. This
patch creates a checkbox that will ignore users that are in already
existing groups. It alters the groups_get_potential_members function so
that the eligible users are retrieved entirely though sql.
* class html_component does not exist any more
* class html_table rendered via html_writer::table()
* html_table, html_table_row and html_table_cell have public $attributes property to set their CSS classes
* dropped rotateheaders feature, should be added again after more research of possible ways (<svg> is not nice IMHO)
* dropped possibility to define CSS classes for table heading, body and footer - can be easily done and better done using just table class and context
* Display the grouping a course module belongs to on the course page - for course managers only.
* When adding users to groups, display the groups a user already belongs to.
* Added an overview report that shows groupings, groups and members for a course.
* Added a dialogue to automatically create groups and assign members based on either the number of desired groups or the number of desired users per group.
