There is no Renderer on Moodle 4.0 (but there is on Master and on 3.11)

[Julian.Tovar]

Good day team, the file ‘renderer.php’ has had its contents wiped out in two commits:

https://bitbucket.org/dw8/moodle-format_tiles/commits/c287087a5871f6fbb8060d4baa558307fa61a129

https://bitbucket.org/dw8/moodle-format_tiles/commits/67caaa8729a6d3ab212026f19a09b754b37b0fa0

I have found no tickets/issues explaining why this file has its contents removed, and found no reference to it on the Wiki.

So I wanted to inquire as to whether or not this is a mistake? This file has its normal contents on the master branch, and on the 3.11 branch, so its contents are only missing on the 4.0 branch.

This file is important, for example for the multisection rendering, the $this reference can be needed, which can only exist within the context of this class (the class defined in the ‘renderer.php' file).

[David Watson]

Hi Julian in this respect, Tiles format is following the same approach adopted by other core formats (e.g. Topics and Weeks) for Moodle 4.0, where you can see something similar has been done. As part of creating the core_courseformat subsystem, “ many of the old course and course format renderer methods are replaced by output components and templates” (more detail in https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-72656, course/upgrade.txt and course/format/renderer.php)

Can you provide more information about the issues this is creating for you? E.g. which theme are you using. At least I can add some comments to the code to help anyone else who may encounter the problem.

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[Julian.Tovar]

Hi David, thank you so so much for that response.

So first let me ask you a kind of meta-question about your development process. It seems to me that the master branch is on 3.11, or at least more so on 3.11 than on 4.0. Is this correct? Because part of my confusion stemmed from the fact that master has the full ‘renderer.php’ contents. So when do you update master? Perhaps when there is a stable release of Tiles for 4.0?

Now that being said, we use Snap, this theme: https://github.com/open-lms-open-source/moodle-theme_snap I actually work on the development of this theme. Along the whole 3.11 development cycle we did many patches to Tiles and Snap to make it work in Snap. In all that time I didn’t realize this was the development hub for Tiles. Many of our patches were placed on the ‘renderer.php’, but given MDL-72656 we have to create new strategies accordingly.

In the end, I think you can close this issue because of MDL-72656

[David Watson]

Thanks Julian I will close this ticket. Yes I will merge 4.0 to master when 4.0 is released as stable,keeping master as the latest stable release. (I’d hoped to do that already but there was an additonal core changed which I had to deal with)