SEARCH_SKIP_INVITATION_ONLY_FILTERING set to False causing "Unknown value type: <class 'bool'>" error on course search

Development
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to hide invitation-only courses from the search results in Open edX. To achieve this, I set the SEARCH_SKIP_INVITATION_ONLY_FILTERING feature flag to False.

However, after making this change, whenever I try to search for a course, I get the following error:

“error”: “Unknown value type: <class ‘bool’>”

It seems like the search backend is not handling the boolean value correctly when this filter is disabled. This might be related to the search engine migration from Elasticsearch to Meilisearch - the boolean filter handling could have changed in that transition - though I could be wrong about this.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Set SEARCH_SKIP_INVITATION_ONLY_FILTERING = False in your LMS settings.

  2. Navigate to the course discovery or search page.

  3. Search for any course.

  4. Observe the error in the response.

Expected behaviour: Invitation-only courses should be hidden from the search results without breaking the search functionality.

Actual behaviour: The search throws an "Unknown value type: <class 'bool'>" error and returns no results.

I believe the error originates from the following part of the codebase, and something in that logic needs to be updated to handle boolean values correctly:

Has anyone else encountered this issue? Is there a workaround or a fix for handling boolean values in the search filter? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

2

Hi @Darshan_Kotak when making posts, kindly indicate which version of Tutor you’re running. Also in this case, are you using the Catalog MFE?

3

Hi, thanks for the response!

I’m running Tutor on the Sumac version. And no, I’m not using the Catalog MFE.

4

Hmm. I’m having a bit of trouble finding this in the code. It seems to be a setting that is referenced only once. It can be the case, unfortunately, that a little-known flag that doesn’t seem to have any tests that test its behavior end up not working down the line.

One clue I got in a bit of digging is a potential reference to the flag, ENABLE_COURSEWARE_INDEX. Could you see if this flag is enabled, and if not, try setting it to True? if that does nothing, I would unfortunately suspect that the SEARCH_SKIP_INVITATION_ONLY_FILTERING flag stopped working at some point and should probably just be removed.

5

Actually, the pull request that added this has some more detail - [SE-4682] Removing invitation-only and non-catalog courses from search results by ha-D · Pull Request #28518 · openedx/openedx-platform · GitHub - check that out and see if the flags they mention are all set on your instance. Do report back, please.