Quiz author or course

Quizzes and questionnaires created by a quiz author are either accessible to any person having access to the quiz server on which they are placed, or accessible only to a group of persons specified by name and password. Specification of such a group must be done separately for each quiz or questionnaire (of the kind mentioned) and must be done by the quiz author her-/himself.

In contrast, for a course, every quiz or questionnaire is in principle accessible only to a group of course participants specified by name and password. Specification may be done by the quiz server administrator. The administrator may, however, give the course instructor permission to create or alter the specification of participants. The words 'in principle' indicate that some of the socalled public material, see the next paragraph, will to some degree always be publicly accessible according to the rules of the internet. In all other aspects a course (instructor) is synonymous with a quiz author.

Resources

The material associated with a quiz author is stored in two directories, one for public material such as dialog quizzes and figure files, the other for non-public material such as quiz definitions, hint files and test quizzes.

These directories must either reside in the common directory (quizcomposer) for QuizComposer or in a directory which has been allocated to the quiz author by the computer administrator (root), the quiz author being a registered user of the computer.

In the former case (which is the most common case) the program for registering a quiz author creates the two directories in quizcomposer. The directories will be removed when the quiz author is removed. You select this case by not stating names for the two directories.

If You enter full path and names of the two directories, these directories must previously have been created by the quiz author (or root) and must have been made accessible to the server for reading, writing and searching (rwx). In this case the program for registering a quiz author creates two symbolic links in quizcomposer to the two directories. When the quiz author is removed only the links are removed. The directories themselves must be removed by the quiz author (or root).

Names of directories or links

The first part of this paragraph may appear to be superfluous information. However, it is written in an attempt of providing a basis for a good understanding the last part of the paragraph.

The non-public directory in quizcomposer (or the corresponding symbolic link) is given the same name as the quiz author identification. The public directory in quizcomposer (or the corresponding symbolic link) gets a name derived from the mail address. The name depends on wether quizzes created by the author are to contain a field for comments from the answerer to the author (or else the @ in the name is replaced by @@ as in: abc@@def.uk) and wether the answerer should be able to demand a list of dialog quizzes (or else a period is added to the name as in: abc@@def.uk.). (This strategy has been adopted partly for reasons of efficiency).

One derived effect is that the same e-mail address can be associated with 4 different author identifications. For two of these there will in th e quizzes be, not be, entry fields for a message from answerer to author. Likewise, dialog quizzes may be, not be, listed. This may also be expressed by saying that the same person can be represented as 4 different authors all having the same e-mail address.

Notice that admin can have the same e-mail address as you in your capacity as 'ordinary' author. This is due the the fact that admin is treated as an ordinary author as concerns resources (the two directories). However, admin is (normally) not used for creating quizzes. If your quizzes should have an entry field for a possible message from quizanswerers the opposite must be true for admin. In your capacity as aministrator you can thus change the e-mail address of admin to be your own even if you use this e-mail address for yourself as author (as long as you spsecify for admin that the possibility of recieving messages directly from the answerers is the 'opposite' of your own). The word change is used deliberately becuse admin will have had an e-mail address set already during installation of the quizserver. You could ofcourse also differentiate between you yourself as ordinary author and admin on the ground of the property 'listing of dialog quizzes' if your dialog quizzes are to be listed, because admins (normally) shouldn't be.

Notice that admins e-mail address appears at the end of the HTML-page presented to quiz authors when they demand a listing of their quizzes. Thereby they can communicate by e-mail with you as administrator.

Password

The password is initially stored in non-crypted form. When used the first time a crypted form is created and the non-crypted form is removed. The non-crypted form can not be recreated from the crypted form.