When Conduit manages courses it can do more than create courses. It can also be used to delete courses and archive those courses prior to deletion. The general settings in Conduit control the course management behavior, including deleting courses.
How to Enable
Head to the Conduit > Settings tab and it should open to the General page.
Scroll down, and you will find the section that manages the Course behavior settings.
In the settings there is an option to enable both auto-delete and auto-archive.
- Auto-delete allows Conduit to delete a course when the delete action is sent to Conduit.
- Auto-archive tells Conduit to first make an archive backup of the course (.mbz) and save it before deleting the course.
In the information icon details you can see for Auto-archive that: “When a course is deleted by Conduit, then the course will be automatically backed up prior to deletion if this option is enabled. Archived courses are stored in dataroot/archive/conduit/courses.”
You can use either Auto-delete or the combination of Auto-delete and Auto-archive.
Managing Conduit Archived Courses
If Conduit’s auto-archive setting is in use you will want to manage those archive files so that they do not just linger on the site consuming storage space. One way to manage those files is to use your SFTP to access the destination folder and move those archives to local storage. (If credentials are needed for the SFTP, please create a support ticket).
Tip: If the category recycle bin is enabled on your site (default is yes), then any deleted courses are also held in the category recycle bin before they are deleted. The default setting on sites is to enable the category recycle bin and hold deleted courses for 1 week.
Deleting outside of Conduit
Once Conduit is in charge of courses and auto-creates them, controlling courses made through Conduit needs to continue through Conduit. If you manually delete a course and Conduit has the record that says make this course, Conduit will do as you asked and make the course new the next time the task runs.
In order to successfully manually delete a course that Conduit created, the record first needs to be removed from Conduit's process before deleting the course.
Conduit can be configured to not auto-delete courses. One approach is to set it to auto-create courses and disable auto-deletion and then remove all the course records when you are done with them. Now you can delete courses manually or in bulk in the Course management interfaces and not worry about Conduit interfering.
Deleting all courses in a category
While Conduit can manage deleting large batches of courses, this process might fill up Conduit's task queue with course deletes, making it unavailable to process other requests (like adding users or new courses) until the long string of course deletions are completed. Another approach can be used if the courses being deleted are in the same course category.
- Make sure that Conduit is set to No for auto-delete courses.
- Delete the courses via Conduit. This will be quick because you are just deleting records out of Conduit's tables, seconds of time for thousands of records.
- Follow that with deleting the courses in the category via the Delete all courses tool in the Category management tools.
Tip: If the courses are in more than one category, after the records are removed from Conduit, use the move tool in the manage courses and categories interface to select the courses for deletion and move them all into one place for deletion in bulk.