353964e75c
Valid courseware URLs currently include: * /course/:courseId * /course/:courseId/:sequenceId * /course/:courseId/:sequenceId/:unitId In this commit we add support for: * /course/:courseId/:sectionId * /course/:courseId/:sectionId/:unitId * /course/:courseId/:unitId All URL forms still redirect to: /course/:courseId/:sequenceId/:unitId See ADR #8 for more context. All changes: * refactor: allow courseBlocks factory to build multiple sections * refactor: make CoursewareContainer tests less brittle & stateful * feat: handle courseware paths more liberally * refactor: reorder, rename, & comment redirection functions TNL-7796
3.4 KiB
Liberal courseware path handling
Status
Accepted
This updates some of the content in ADR #2: Courseware page decisions.
Context
The courseware container currently accepts three path forms:
/course/:courseId/course/:courseId/:sequenceId/course/:courseId/:sequenceId/:unitId
Forms #1 and #2 are always redirected to Form #3 via simple set of rules:
- If the sequenceId is not specified, choose the first sequence in the course.
- If the unitId is not specified, choose the active unit in the sequence, or the first unit if none are active.
Thus, Form #3 is effectively the canonoical path; all Learning MFE units should be served from it. We acknowledge that the best user experience is to link directly to the canonoical path when possible, since it skips the redirection steps. Still, there are times when it is necessary or prudent to link just to a course or a sequence.
Through recent work in the LMS, we are realizing that there are also times where it would be simpler or more performant to link a user to an entire section without specifying a squence or to a unit without including the sequence. Specifically, this capability would let as avoid further modulestore or block transformer queries in order to discern the course structure when trying to direct a learner to a section or unit. Futhermore, we hypothesize that being able to build a Learning MFE courseware link with just a unit ID or a section ID will be a nice simplifying quality for future development or debugging.
Decision
The courseware container will accept five total path forms:
/course/:courseId/course/:courseId/:sectionId/course/:courseId/:sectionId/:unitId/course/:courseId/:sequenceId/course/:courseId/:unitId/course/:courseId/:sequenceId/:unitId
The redirection rules are as follows:
- Forms #1 redirects to Form #4 by selecting the first sequence in the course.
- Form #2 redirects to Form #4 by selecting to the first sequence in the section.
- Form #3 redirects to Form #5 by dropping the section ID.
- Form #4 redirects to Form #6 by choosing the active unit in the sequence (or the first unit, if none are active).
- Form #5 redirects to Form #6 by filling in the ID of the sequence that the specified unit belongs to (in the edge case where the unit belongs to multiple sequences, the first sequence is selected).
As before, Form #5 is the canonocial courseware path, which is always redirected to by any of the other courseware path forms.
Consequences
The above decision is implemented.
Further work
At some point, we may decide to further extend the URL scheme to be more human-readable.
We can't make UsageKeys themselves more readable because they're tied to student state,
but we could introduce a new optional slug field on Sequences,
which would be captured and propagated to the learning_sequences API.
We could eventually do something similar to Units, since those slugs only have to be sequence-local.
So eventually, URLs could look less like:
https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:edX+DemoX.1+2T2019/block-v1:edX+DemoX.1+2T2019+type@sequential+block@e0a61b3d5a2046949e76d12cac5df493/block-v1:edX+DemoX.1+2T2019+type@vertical+block@52dbad5a28e140f291a476f92ce11996
And more like:
https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:edX+DemoX.1+2T2019/Being_Social/Teams