Enabling Custom Course Settings

Development
1

Hi all,
I’ve found this interesting feature: Enabling Custom Course Settings.
This adds an “Other course settings” field in the course’s advance configuration.

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Does anybody know where is this data stored? How can it be used in another application?

2

There’s a brief description included in the PR that brought that feature into the platform:

This adds a field to the “advanced settings” page of each course that allows the user to store additional metadata about the course, in a JSON dictionary, without requiring updating the platform code.

The idea is that this field can hold metadata like “ID of the course in external system”, course difficulty, or other instance-specific metadata about the course that needs to be available to the theme, CRM software, a marketing site, ecommerce, or other external systems.

The new field is protected by a feature flag which is False by default, so it won’t show up in Studio unless you enable the flag.

3

Hi Dave!
Thanks for your response!
I’ve seen that also in the docs… however I don’t know how to retrieve that information if I want to use it. Do you know where is it stored, and how to query it?

4

Hello everyone,

I’m using Tutor 13.2.2 e Open edX maple.3 and enable the feature ENABLE_OTHER_COURSE_SETTINGS in CMS. The idea is to have an integration using the REST API, but I couldn’t find an endpoint to get this information.

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I’ve tried all GET endpoints with a course_id as path param.

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Ref.: Add Course Metadata

1 Like
5

They should be available as a field for the root CourseBlock of a course in the Course Blocks API

Edit: And probably also as part of the OLX export?

6

I got it!

  1. Getting access token: the path in the doc is wrong, the right is /oauth2/access_token, without v1 or v2.

    curl --location --request POST 'https://${LMS_HOST}/oauth2/access_token' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
--data-urlencode 'grant_type=client_credentials' \
--data-urlencode 'client_id=${CLIENT_ID}' \
--data-urlencode 'client_secret=${CLIENT_SECRET}'

    {
    "access_token": "xxx-very-secret-access-token-xxx",
    "expires_in": 36000,
    "token_type": "Bearer",
    "scope": "read write email profile"
}

  2. Enable feature ENABLE_OTHER_COURSE_SETTINGS

  3. Enable COURSE_BLOCKS_API_EXTRA_FIELDS

  4. Getting course blocks: add query param: requested_fields=other_course_settings

    curl --location --request GET 'https://${LMS_HOST}/api/courses/v2/blocks/?course_id=course-v1%3AOrg%2BDO101%2B2022-04&username=admin&requested_fields=other_course_settings' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer ${ACCESS_TOKEN}'
1 Like
7

Great @erickhgm!
Worked like charm! Only had to use double quotes to have the variables replaced.

I also found where is it persisted in MongoDB:
It’s in the modulestore.structures collection, in the fields dict of the course block type:

{
   "_id":"ObjectId(""nnnnnnn"")",
   "root":[
      "course",
      "course"
   ],
   ...
   "blocks":[
      {
         "fields":{
            "display_name":"Demonstration Course",
            ...,
            "other_course_settings":{
               "test_other_course_settings":"value"
            },
            "show_calculator":true,
            ...

Many thanks for your help!

1 Like
8

Hi Erick,

I tried this and it works in general. But, everytime I change the content of the other_course_settings field in an Open Edx Course (via the browser) the other_course_settings field disappears completely from the API result! In my experience for a few days, then it shows up with the new information. That’s very weird! Do you have a hint for me how to avoid this?

Thanks and best!

1 Like
9

Hi @resa,
It’s strange… I’ve tested it and noticed a few seconds until the change is reflected in the API output but not days as you mention, or having the field disappeared. May be a cache issue?

10

Hi Andres,

thanks a lot for your answer. That’s what we thought, too, at first. But, when I enter something in the “other course settings” field via the browser, the field disappears at once in the API result. If it would be a cache issue, I would see the old value for a while. We use the Version olive, maybe that could be a problem?

Thanks a lot again,
Remon

11

I’m running Olive.4. I tested again today with Postman and it worked fine.
Make sure you have these settings:

"FEATURES": {
        "ENABLE_OTHER_COURSE_SETTINGS": True
}
"COURSE_BLOCKS_API_EXTRA_FIELDS": [
            ('course', 'other_course_settings')
],
12

Thanks, Andres!

I will give it a try again when our palm Version is ready, although it should work with olive, too.

Best
Remon

13

I came across this problem too. It looks to be a problem with the course block cache. I’m not sure whether the specific xblocks get deleted from the cache or there is an error as they’re updating; not something I can debug.

The solution for me was to force a cache update with

./manage.py lms generate_course_blocks --all_courses --force_update
14

This issue seems to be that update_xblocks_cache in openedx/core/djangoapps/bookmarks/tasks.py runs when an advanced setting is updated but it doesn’t add COURSE_BLOCKS_API_EXTRA_FIELDS, and removes it if it’s already in the cache.