Step 20 – Progress and Completion – Initialization

I’m going to get started on the mandatory ‘progress and completion’ elements:

• cmi.core.lesson_location
• cmi.core.credit
• cmi.core.lesson_status
• cmi.core.entry
• cmi.core.exit

Of these, only the 3 shown above in bold need to be initialized with specified values. So I’ll modify my initialize.php code to include the following lines:

// if not set, cmi.core.credit should be set to 'credit'
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.credit')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if (! $value) { 
  mysql_query("delete from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.credit')",$link);
  mysql_query("insert into scormvars (varName,varValue) values ('cmi.core.credit','credit')",$link);
}

// if not set, cmi.core.lesson_status should be set to 'not attempted'
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if (! $value) { 
  mysql_query("delete from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
  mysql_query("insert into scormvars (varName,varValue) values ('cmi.core.lesson_status','not attempted')",$link);
}

// if not set, cmi.core.entry should be set to 'ab initio'
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.entry')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if (! $value) { 
  mysql_query("delete from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.entry')",$link);
  mysql_query("insert into scormvars (varName,varValue) values ('cmi.core.entry','ab initio')",$link);
}

You’ll see that I’ve chosen the value ‘credit’ as the initial value for cmi.core.credit. The SCORM specification says that this is a read-only element that wil be set by the LMS. For my “imaginary” LMS, I’m going to assume that any course I come across is going to be done for credit (and this is probably going to be the case in the vast majority of real applications!).

Now, when I start my test course running, this is what my ‘scormvars’ table contains:

You’ll see that the course has already changed the value of cmi.core.lesson_status to ‘failed’ – I’ll look at the handling of cmi.core.lesson_status later – but it all looks pretty good so far. Now to examine what happens when the course sets element values … and that’s where things get a little more tricky.