Documentation for xBlock Asides?

Development
1

I’m trying to find documentation for the xBlockAsides feature initially described in this google doc and implemented in the sample “Thumbs” xBlock in the xBlock SDK.

MIT Open Learning has been using this extension point for some time now in its Rapid Response xBlock, but the UI doesn’t work in the Course Authoring MFE. We’ve opened a PR to address this, and it would be helpful to have some documentation to explain the context for product review and code review.

If there is no documentation, we can write some, although I need guidance on where such documentation belongs.

Peter Pinch
MIT Open Learning

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I was hoping that there would be something XBlock Concepts — XBlock API Guide documentation but there is nothing. @dave, @kmccormick or @braden any of you aware of any good docs for asides that might be elsewhere?

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I have a PR open that would add some rudimentary reference documentation.

Other than that, I am not aware of any Aside docs.

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I’m not aware of any documentation. I didn’t even think the feature was fully implemented tbh.

Alongside documentation, if this is a feature we intend to support in the future, it would be great to have examples of asides in the sample course for authors and the devstack default course(s), to raise awareness and facilitate easier regression testing.

1 Like
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Asides were fully implemented, but the implementation on the studio side predates a lot of changes and certainly predates the MFEs. They basically do not work at all in studio.

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Looking through the history of Asides, I see that they were developed initially to support tagging of XBlocks. @braden or @dave, do you here know if that is still part of the implementation plan for Content Tagging?

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Thanks @feanil. I think we can add some basic developer documentation here.

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No, we’re not planning to use asides for any of the new tagging features.

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@pdpinch it looks like Kyle is adding some more docs as a part of an XBlock refactor PR: feat!: collapse extraneous XBlock mixins by kdmccormick · Pull Request #718 · openedx/XBlock · GitHub Hopefully, that is a good starting point and you can review and add more to those docs.