Unenrolling an account in a course - not deleting

My customer the other day said "oh Lord, I know this is pie in the sky thinking, but I wish I could unenroll a student from a course and just leave their enrollment data hidden in the course"... it pays to sit and listen to people, you gain their perspective and their needs.  I paraphrased what she said testing my understanding.

"you said you would like to be able to leave an enrollment in a course when the student drops or completes a course, without it showing to the student, correct?" - she confirmed this as what she said.

Currently, my customer, when a student drops or completes a course, backs the course up and then unenrolls the account.  This leaves her with a bunch of backups throughout the year, since students do complete and drop courses frequently.

Today, I found a little time and through through this request a bit.  My first thought was does moodle have a native facility for this?  Can I somehow mark an enrollment as disabled?

I thought of the database and the deleted bit, which marks a user as deleted but does not really remove the record.  This would not work because it lacked the more granular content of an enrollment.

I choose a course, on my RD server, not the live server, and clicked on the participants link in the Participants block.

I turned on editing, which added the edit icon to the right of the All participants title.

Clicking this edit icon loaded the enrollment types of each of the participants, like this:

I clicked the edit icon for the enrollment in question which presented me with the enrollment details form.

I enabled and specified an Enrollment ends date of yesterday and saved the changes. I returned to the Participants list and the enrollment did not display.  I fired up a second browser and logged in as the student whose enrollment I just changed and the course did not display for them.  If I remove the end date, the enrollment appears in the Participants list and when the student logs in.

Moral of the story?

You do not have to un-enroll an account when it drops or completes.  You only need to EXPLICITLY state a Enrollment End date for the enrollment to *disable or prevent an enrollment from displaying to a student and the participants list.