Remove old 'multichoice' module and rename 'choice' module to 'multichoice'

Hi!

I have been planning to do this in choice.module:

1. Set a message on install/enable giving ppl a link to a site where they can convert multichoice questions to choice questions. I will probably let the link show on other pages as well until the convertation has been done.

2. On the convert page:

2.1. Ask ppl to back up their database. Give them a button to push when they are ready to proceed.
2.2. Start a batch job that converts multichoice questions into choice question and also converts saved results.
2.3. Show ppl a page telling them how the convertation went, and giving them a link to uninstall multichoice(and clean up everything)
2.4. Show an end page.

Now the risky part is 2.2. It is easy to make it work on my own system, but it might be alot harder to make it work well on all drupal setups with all kinds of contributed modules involved. But I think it is feasible to make a converter that works on 99% of the cases. It is just about moving data between tables, and adjusing it a litle, as well as updating the type column in the node table.

Any thoughts?

> Here are some possible degrees of the thoroughness for the conversion:
> 1) For every 'multichoice' node, make a 'choice' node
> 2) For every revision of the 'multichoice' node, make a 'choice' node revision
> 3) For every quiz or qcollection that contains a 'multichoice' node, update the relationships to point to the 'choice' node
> 4) For every quiz or qcollection, generate a revision of it in which it points to the new choice nodes instead
> 5) For every reference to the 'multichoice' node in the db, point instead to the new 'choice'

> What level will you be shooting for?

As we have spoken about in IRC I think the best solution is to make choice replace multichoice entirely(that is also renaming choice to multichoice), and doing the conversion in multichoice.install.

Waiting for sivaji/mbutcher to comment on this.

I will begin replacing multichoice with choice at the end of this week if none of the maintainers has any objections.

I haven't studied the old multichoice in detail, but as far as I can tell the only big difference in the datamodel and control is that multichoice can be either right or wrong, where as choice has a more fine grained scoring model. I will add the old righ/wrong scoring as an option in choice so that we won't have to recalculate the scores for existing multichoice questions.(Of course, technically recalculating them is no problem, but in many use-cases recalculating scores will be a problem. If for instance students who previously failed a test passes it or something...)

This sounds fantastic. I am very happy to see a better alternative for multiple choice.

Pending sivaji's approval, you can go ahead with this.

+1 for this. I don't think that this will affect my gsoc code, so you can go ahead and do this.

The personality style questions that are supported in the old multichoice are not supported in the new multichoice(at the moment).

With the old multichoice module you could create personality style quizzes by setting the max score of the quiz to 0. In the new multichoice there won't be any support for personality style questions at all. At least not the way things are today.

I don't think personality style questions belong in quiz 4.x. The way I see it a question in quiz 4.x is supposed to be scored(with points), or assessed in some other way. It is suppose to be used for testing skills and knowledge, and for learning. Not for personality tests. Personality tests and assessments have very little in common, and therefor I suggest that we once and for all remove the support for personality tests in quiz.

I don't have anything against personality test. It can be a nice addition on a website! I just don't think that the quiz module is the right place for personality tests anymore.

This issue is relevant: http://drupal.org/node/446858

Personality quiz is not relevant for my employer. That means that I unfortunately don't have the time to implement a separate personality quiz module. Hopefully someone else will do it soon!

Any thoughts? Can we stop supporting personality quizzes? Does anyone have any idea about how many of our users uses personality quizzes?

Thanks for the feedback turadg!

Re #12:
I'm all for matching nomenclature. We might rename the table to alternatives later. The reason for using alter instead of moving data is performance. Making a new table and moving data between tables would make nicer code, but I think performance is substantially better the way it is currently beeing done. (I'm no expert on the inner workings of databases though) Also the risk of getting code corrupted should be smaller this way.

Re #13:
You might have encountered several bugs :) The code commited to 4.x-dev yester day only passed some very simple tests, and it is not feature complete either. Although it should have updated your alternatives. I will continue developing and testing it today. I will probably also write a unit test for it, or achieve the same effect in some other way. But most importantly I'll make a post in quiz group and try to have someone with a big question bank test the update feature.

This has been commited:
/**
* Implementation of hook_update_N().
* quiz_node_question_properties has been considered deprecated. With the new multichoice module
* it is not beeing used at all, and therefore we remove it.
*/
function quiz_update_6400() {
$result = array();
db_drop_table($result, 'quiz_node_question_properties');
return $result;
}

Also the table has been removed from the schema hook.

(The dropped table isn't being used by the choice->multichoice converter)

I have postponed this task, but will come back to it.

I still don't think making another table is the best option.(I haven't made up my mind yet.)

Admins are supposed to back up their entire database and codebase before upgrading. We shouldn't have to do that for them.