The general settings in Conduit handle the behavior of Conduit and how it processes the data coming in through the mappings. This article will review the various settings on that General settings page with details on how the tool operates based on those settings.
Where is it?
Head into Conduit > Settings and the General settings view will load. If you are already in Conduit you can choose the Settings tab and the first page is the General settings page.
Cron
First up is the Cron settings. Cron is shorthand for scheduled tasks. This section covers the scheduled tasks and overall administration behavior of Conduit.
Cron enabled
Cron should be enabled, if it is disabled then Conduit will not run and will not process any information. It might be useful to disable Cron while troubleshooting an issue, but generally speaking it should be on and stay on.
Remove logs
Conduit has support for robust logging of transactions. This is great, however over time the logging will create a lot of records and this will slow down the report views. Remove logs provides standard support for managing the logs automatically. You can set the logs to be deleted or archived (written to a text file and then deleted) on the schedule in the settings. Options are Archive, Delete, and Never to support the removal of old logs or to disable this feature, and the time cycle of 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, 5 months, and 6 months. Choose the cycle that best fits your needs and log activity levels. Our baseline recommendation is to use Archive combined with 3 or 6 months. Use 1 month if sending large levels of transactions through Conduit.
Archived logs are written out to your site’s dataroot/archive/conduit/logs/. Be sure to periodically head into the SFTP and clear out old files or put them somewhere for storage. There may be some confidential information in the files like usernames or email addresses.
Tip: If you are experiencing long load times or general slowness on the Reports tab in Conduit, check the Remove logs setting and consider enabling it or changing the schedule of removal.
Emails and notifications
Conduit not only logs transactions but also can notify admins about operations and issues. Transaction information can be sent out via email and there is support for using in system notifications as well.
Transactions
Set the type of transactions to send notifications about. Options are None, All, File and web service, Non-empty, Errors and warnings, and Errors only.
- None turns off notifications.
- All notifies for all transactions including cron work and command line tasks.
- File and web service includes all file and web service transactions including those that may be empty of information.
- Non-empty is the same as File and web service but eliminates all the empty transactions.
- Errors and warnings are sent out only when there is an error or warning on the transaction.
- Errors only messages are sent on just errors not for warnings.
Send to
Who does the message go out to? This provides a selection list of all users with site admin rights, which are needed to interact with Conduit. You may choose one or more of the users in the list, or none. If no users are selected, then there will be no messages sent. The list shows the user’s name and email address.
Attachment
Allows you to set the email to also include an attachment with the relevant log information. Options are None, CSV, TSV.
This can be useful for automation that can handle the CSV or TSV file format. Default is None.
Send notifications
This optional checkbox allows you to have Conduit also send in system notifications based on the settings in the user notifications settings. User Notification preferences includes Conduit Transaction notification as an item for site administrators. You could use this option to have Conduit send push notifications to the mobile app for errors for example.
Conduit to Moodle lookup fields
These fields allow you to tell Conduit what record field to use as the key identifier for users, courses, and roles. These fields are best set at configuration (before use) and not being changed, but they can be changed even after records have been passed through Conduit. In this case, Conduit will validate that all the affected records in Conduit conform to the new option and issue a warning if not.
For example, if changing user records from username to idnumber, Conduit will first verify that all existing user records have a value for the idnumber. If not it will warn that there are records that need to be changed first and let you update those records with idnumbers before letting the change occur.
User records can be set to be identified by username (the default), email address, or (external) idnumber. By setting the record to idnumber, you tie the user account to this external data and can change the username and email as much as needed without creating new records. Ideally this idnumber would also be not personally identifiable and would provide a clean way of referring to a user in transactions without including their username or email.
Courses can be identified by shortname (default) or an idnumber, which is hidden from the student user in the system.
Roles can be addressed by shortname (default) or full name whichever is best for your data source.
Tip: When you select a lookup field for these records, the Mapping view updates to show the required indicator on the correct field in the mappings.
User
This section sets the defaults and behaviors for Conduit handling user records. Most of the settings involve handling and creating passwords for accounts which are not being managed or authenticated with other services.
When external is removed
This setting tells Conduit what to do in Open LMS when a user is deleted from Conduit. The options are Keep internal, Delete internal, and Suspend internal.
Keep internal tells Conduit to delete the record it has but to leave the account in Open LMS the way it is. The user can continue to login and use the system as normal.
Delete internal tells Conduit to delete the account in both the table it has and from Open LMS. This will remove the account from the system completely.
Suspend internal tells Conduit to delete the account from the table it has and set the account in Open LMS to the authentication type “nologin” which leaves the account in place but prevents it from being used anymore. This preserves the user information for future reporting while removing access to the account. Creating the account again will reactivate the account for the user.
Password hash
Identify what password hash is being used for passwords being sent to Conduit. Supports Plain, MD5, and BCrypt.
If not passing passwords through Conduit, this is not necessary.
Create password
On account creation, should the system create a password and email the information to the user at the specified email address. Yes or no.
Create password if it is
This offers a text field to be used. If a password value is provided here, when Conduit processes a new account and the password value for the record is a match for this value, Conduit will create a new password and notify the user of the account details. If not, then it will skip that process.
Force password change
On account creation, should the force password change flag be forced on for the account. If forced on, when the user first logs in they will be taken to the reset password page to create a new permanent password.
Update all user accounts
Enable this to allow Conduit to update all user accounts, not just those set to authenticate and be managed by Conduit. Useful to pass changes to accounts that use another authentication method like ldap or saml2.
Course
This section sets the defaults and behaviors for Conduit handling course records. There are a large number of settings here that control a wide range of behaviors. Conduit is designed to support a wide range of approaches to managing courses through these various settings.
Auto-create courses
When set to Yes, this tells Conduit to create new courses in Open LMS when a new course creation is received. In essence this setting turns on the rest of the settings here and enables the creation of courses.
Auto-update courses
When set to Yes, this tells Conduit to pass updates from fields marked in the Mappings to update Moodle when there are updates in the Conduit record for those fields. It is essential to enable this to allow passing changes to course settings through Conduit.
Auto-delete courses
When set to Yes, this tells Conduit to delete courses in Open LMS when a deletion is handled by Conduit for a course record. If left to No, Conduit will delete the record it has but leave the course behind in the system.
Auto-archive courses
Used in combination with the Auto-delete courses setting. This tells Conduit to first make an archive copy of the specified course prior to deleting it.
Archives will be normal course backups using default settings and be written to the SFTP space at site_dataroot/archive/conduit/courses/. This backup can be downloaded manually or by script via SFTP.
Default category
Drop down list of all categories on the site currently. Select a Category to set default so that if a course is created without a category specified it will be put in the selected category.
Auto-create category
Category separator
This text field allows you to specify the separator character used in category paths to indicate sub categories. If your data source does not provide subcategories then you can leave this blank. Otherwise, use the character from the record used to indicate the sub category in the path.
For example, if our Student Information System records the term and department as category information and we would like to make sub categories within the term from the department details provided we can specify that separator. If the SIS passes Fall_2022|Mathematics as the term information, we can tell Conduit that the pipe character “|” is the separator and it would read that as top level category Fall_2022 and subcategory Mathematics.
Parent separator
The Parent separator is for specifying the separator in a list of multiple parent courses for the new course (or course update record). Conduit can handle parent course relationships, and a single course can have more than one parent course if needed. This field specifies the separator character used in between the multiple parent courses.
Tip: Since you are probably using a CSV to pass the record information, commas are already in use and should not be used to try to break up a list of records. The Comma Separated Volume will interpret those commas as new columns, not one record field.
Hide after course end date
Enable this to tell Conduit to automatically hide a course after the course end date has passed. Conduit will change the course visibility to hidden to remove the course from student view once the end date has passed.
Treat category names as record IDs
In Open LMS, categories are also identified with an internal record number which can be seen in the category path and other locations. This setting when enabled tells Conduit that when it sees a number in the category name field it should interpret that number to be the Open LMS category id number and match the category up that way. This is a somewhat unique use case and is likely to not be needed and is left on No by default.
Default template
This text field allows you to specify a course template to be used when none is specified in the course creation. Identify the course to be used by the shortname or idnumber based on the settings used in the lookup fields setting for Courses.
Restore (from)
Options are No, Restore from backup, and Restore from current.
- No tells Conduit to not restore templates for new courses.
- Restore from backup tells Conduit to use a specified backup file to restore from or create one if there is no backup file present.
- Restore from current tells Conduit to restore from a fresh backup of the template course each time a new course is created from that template.
Tip: Restore from current doubles the new course creation time. Each new course with a template specified will first trigger a backup of the template and then a restore of the template. When using restore from a template with more than one course being made from the same template it is recommended to use Restore from backup.
Restore template name
When using the Restore from backup mode, you may specify the name that Conduit uses to identify the backup to use. Default is “conduit_template.mbz”. If you need Conduit to create a new backup file for a template course you can manually delete this file from the backups directory in the course.
Tip: This setting is disabled if Restore (from) is not set to Restore from backup.
Failed course deletion
If enabled, Conduit will automatically delete the failed attempt at creating a course if there is an error in course creation. Errors will still be logged in the transaction logs.
Enrollments
This section sets how Conduit handles deletions of enrollments.
Auto-unenroll users
This setting tells Conduit to pass unenrollment actions when an enrollment is deleted in Conduit. The default is Yes, delete the enrollment when the enrollment is deleted in Conduit.
Groups
Sets the handling of Groups in Conduit. All are set to Yes by default
Auto-create groups
Set to Yes in order to have Conduit create groups in Open LMS when a group is created in Conduit.
Auto-update groups
Set to Yes in order to have Conduit update group details in Open LMS when a group is updated in Conduit.
Auto-delete groups
Set to Yes in order to have Conduit delete groups in Open LMS when a group is deleted in Conduit.
Group Members
Sets the handling of Group members in Conduit. All are set to Yes by default
Auto-assign members
Set to Yes in order to have Conduit add members to groups in Open LMS when a group member is created in Conduit.
Auto-remove members
Set to Yes in order to have Conduit delete members from a group in Open LMS when a group member is deleted in Conduit.
Export
At the bottom of the page along with the save changes and cancel button is an option to Export the settings on the page. This can be used to create an export file of the General settings that can be imported into another site’s Conduit or used to save a copy of the current configuration before making changes. Clicking on the Export button will download an XML file with the General settings configuration.
Tip: You can use this to set up and test changes on a sandbox environment and then export and import those settings to a production environment. Use the Settings > Import tab to import a settings file.