Step 23 – More About cmi.core.lesson_status

OK … time to implement the handling of cmi.core.lesson_status as I discussed in Step 22.

I’ve already covered the initialization of cmi.core.lesson_status in Step 20, so I don’t have to worry about that. So most of my changes will be to the finish.php code that’s used when LMSFinish() is invoked by the SCO (if you don’t know what a SCO is, please see my last post). Just as a reminder, here’s the logic flow that I’m going to follow.

The first part of the process is pretty simple. I find the current value of cmi.core.lesson_status and, if it’s still set to the initial value (‘not attempted’), I change it to ‘completed’.

// find existing value of cmi.core.lesson_status
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);

// if it's 'not attempted', change it to 'completed'
if ($value == 'not attempted') {
  mysql_query("update scormvars set varValue='completed' where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
}

So far, so good. Now I have to look to see if a mastery score has been set in the IMS manifest file. If I had a functional LMS, the manifest file would have been read by the LMS when the content aggregation package (what many of us would commonly call a course package) was imported and installed. But I don’t have a real LMS right now (I’ll work on that later), so I’m going to assume that it’s been read and stored in my database as an element called ‘adlcp:masteryscore’. To mimic this, I modify my initialize.php code like this (assuming a 90% passing score).

// if not set, adlcp:masteryscore should be set to the value from the IMS manifest file
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='adlcp:masteryscore')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if (! $value) {
  mysql_query("delete from scormvars where (varName='adlcp:masteryscore')",$link);
  mysql_query("insert into scormvars (varName,varValue) values ('adlcp:masteryscore','90')",$link);
}

And my new finish.php code looks like this.

// find existing value of cmi.core.lesson_status
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);

// if it's 'not attempted', change it to 'completed'
if ($value == 'not attempted') {
  mysql_query("update scormvars set varValue='completed' where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
}

// has a mastery score been specified in the IMS manifest file?
$result = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='adlcp:masteryscore')",$link);
list($value) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
$value *= 1;

if ($value) {

  // yes - so read the score
  $result2 = mysql_query("select varValue from scormvars where (varName='cmi.score.raw')",$link);
  list($value2) = mysql_fetch_row($result2);
  $value2 *= 1;

  // set cmi.core.lesson_status to passed/failed
  if ($value2 >= $value) {
    mysql_query("update scormvars set varValue='passed' where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
  }
  else {
    mysql_query("update scormvars set varValue='failed' where (varName='cmi.core.lesson_status')",$link);
  }

}

Time to test it out … the SCO runs through to the end and I score 88 – enough to pass according to the SCO itself. This is what the database table looks like at the end of the SCO but before LMSFinish() has been called.

Then I close the SCO window causing LMSFinish() to be called and here’s what happens.

The mastery score set by my ‘imaginary’ LMS has caused the SCO to be graded as a fail rather than as the pass that the SCO intended which is – from my reading of the SCORM specification – what is intended.