Give certificate programmatically

@adamkowalski,

Really stoked to see a developer looking to extend our existing functionality —

to programmatically award a certificate you’ll want to checkout our LLMS_Engagements class (includes/class.llms.engagements.php). Access the class itself via LLMS()->engagements()

You can then use the “handle_certificate() method to award the certificate.

I don’t have the method documented online anywhere but look at the inline docblock on the function for description of arguments you should pass to the function.

Finally, if you look at the function’s constructor, there’s a handful of filters you can hook into which would allow you to hook directly into our achievement’s engine so you can add your custom trigger to the list of available triggers, should you wish to go down that road.

In your scenario you’d create a Cert and award it however you see fit, but if you hook into our filters you’d need to simply call the action and our engagements class would take care of the rest. Then you could create an Engagement post and select your engagement from the list of engagements.

This requires a bit more work on your part though but would create a more complete integration.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or need anything else and have a great day,

@thomasplevy,

Thanks for the quick reply!

So there is a bit of a hiccup in the project we are working on, as we already have a deployed project with version 1.4.3 Of LifterLMS. After looking through your reply and comparing the code on GitHub with our local version it seems as if the API has changed quite a bit in terms of engagements and certificates.

We are going to discuss as a team the implications of migrating to a newer version, however, I am wondering if you could help me figure out how to approach this problem using the older version of the API.

I have found a function called custom_certificate_earned in v1.4.3

function custom_certificate_earned( $person_id, $certificate_id, $engagement_id ) {
  if ( ! $person_id )
    return;

  $certificate = $this->emails['LLMS_Certificate_User'];

  $certificate->trigger( $person_id, $certificate_id, $engagement_id );
}

Which seems to be analogous to trigger_engagement in v2.7.4

function trigger_engagement( $person_id, $certificate_id, $related_post_id ) {
  $certificate = $this->certs['LLMS_Certificate_User'];
  $certificate->trigger( $person_id, $certificate_id, $related_post_id );
}

I have a person_id and a certificate_id to give it, but what would you use for an engagement_id if the certificate should be given regardless of whether or not the engagement has fired?

@adamkowalski,

Disclaimer: There were some *major* problems with our codebase as related to engagements which were resolved in our 2.3.0 release where we refactored everything engagements related to ensure things were working the way they were supposed to be working.

In both cases, the $engagement_id should be the WordPress post id of whatever post completed the engagement. We actually have a backlogged task to figure out how to make this 3rd parameter unnecessary. If you look through a bit further you’ll find an @todo noting this exact issue in relation to our user registration events (which has no related post).

At this very moment we pass the engagement_id twice. In your case it would be the certificate_id.

I think that should work but please please please thoroughly test this before putting anything into production. We’ll be resolving this internally at some point in the future and giving some method to record the action if it has no related post id.

Take care,

@thomasplevy,

Thank you for letting me know!

After playing around with the code above it seems that I had to change one line:

$certificate = $this->emails['LLMS_Certificate_User'];
// to
$certificate = $this->certs['LLMS_Certificate_User'];

As $this->emails wasn’t in scope. After making that change and calling the function with the parameters you suggested (person_id, cert_id, cert_id) I was able to give a student a certificate!

However, unfortunately the template did not correctly render and all the tags such as {first_name} and {last_name} do not get replaced with the students information and are instead blank. Is there a good way to solve this problem? Right now I am thinking about running a sql query to find the actual certificate and parse the generated certificate placing the correct information where it belongs.

The strange thing is, that when I started drilling around in the database it seems like it is stored as just a WordPress post and it has a field called post_content.

I extracted that data out and just looked at it as a regular html document and it looks correct, with the names and dates as intended. I will try to dig around and see what the code looks like where the template string is replaced with the actual data.

Hey @adamkowalski,

You’re absolutely right, there’s issues in the codebase you’re using. That’s why we released updates!

I don’t really know how to resolve those for you as my answer to resolving those bugs come in the form of the codebase at 2.3.0 when we overhauled the system.

Take care,

@thomasplevy,

Thank you for all your help, I will mark this as resolved as I think I know how to finish up from here. I will definitely try to get us onto a path where we can upgrade the version relatively soon. It seems like you guys have implemented a lot of exciting features that would be nice to incorporate into our project.

@adamkowalski,

I’d very much recommend upgrading but I understand the way projects go. Upgrading (especially from that far back) is often more difficult than it needs to be. Especially when things start to get heavily customized or modified.

Anyways, good luck and please let me know if you need anything else related to this or otherwise.

Take care,