Adding search to your Moodle plugin - post mortem

Post Mortem - Production ready search

I ended up in a lot of discussions with other Moodle developers on the best way to implement the question content search. Originally, I created a separate search area, but was hampered by the fact that I couldn't reliably keep a record per question linked to a questionnaire instance.

The search API didn't allow me to create my own index other than an integer. If it would have allowed me to construct my own, I could have stored information that identified the questionnaire and question. This resulted in the creation of the Moodle tracker item MDL-57857.

However, as we discussed this particular problem more, it really seemed that if I was searching for questionnaire instances that contained the searched for question content, then the index should really be part of the activity search. This resulted in the update I posted at the end of the last post. While that worked, the return results displayed weren't very attractive and, as was pointed out, would also include question content that may never have been displayed to the use. Questionnaires can choose questions to display based on answers to other questions.

At that point, I realized that the most likely use case for searching for question content would be for users who can access all of the question content of a questionnaire. This would be users who could actually edit the questions and users who could see all of the responses to any question.

So, it made more sense to again separate out the question search area into its own search area. This allows for two important things:

1. Allows the administrator of the site to determine if they want to even allow question content searching.
2. Allows the access for this content to be limited to users who have the ability to see all of the question content for a questionnaire.

You can see the final code I decided on here. The question area still stores one record per questionnaire activity, like the activity area, but it uses a different set of access rules. And, since it is a separate area, it can be enabled/disabled globally, and filtered on separately.

I believe that until there is a way to store information in the search index that allows me to go directly to the question within a specific questionnaire, this is the best solution.