Dear Helpful Moodle Community,
I'm hoping that you can provide some guidance relating to my issue at hand. I've been studying the moodle documentation for days, but it's massive and I'm having some trouble. My goal is to be able to submit student responses to questions using html form elements combined with some type of API. From what I can see, none of the default external functions allow me to do this. The only options are at a macro level (create course, enroll user, create group, etc). I need it at a micro level (submit an answer to 1 question). I'm looking to have the student click a submit button inside of a html form element and have that cause the answer to be stored in the moodle database for that user.
This is complicated by the fact that questions don't seem to be stand alone instances. It seems like questions are only available either within Quizes or Lessons.
The only possible route I can currently see towards acheiving my goal is to use some type of direct database manipulation. In other words, if I find out exactly what tables are being modified when a student submits an answer to a quiz question, theoretically I could make those same changes when a student submits their response via the html form. This would involve creating my own custom web service function that would modify the required tables in the database directly using the parameters I pass in. However, I'm not sure this would even work.
Has anyone encountered anything similar to this? Is there an easier way to do what I want that I'm missing? I just want to submit the answer to a question through an external http function and store it in the moodle database correctly. Should be that hard, right? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time and help,
Best Regards,
Your-Fellow-Moodler