The course search behaviour for courses with different visibility settings

Development
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The goal of this discourse:

  • define the desired behavior for the course search in the context of courses with different course visibility settings

Intro

The course could be set up in the Studio’s advanced settings using different visibility options (option descriptions were taken from the setting field description):

  • none (do not show in catalog and do not allow access to an about page)
  • about (only allow access to the about page)
  • both (show in catalog and allow access to about page)

The feature for excluding courses with visibility “none” from the search results on the LMS’s “Discover New” page was introduced in the Nutmeg release.

The feature is gated with the SEARCH_SKIP_SHOW_IN_CATALOG_FILTERING setting. It defaults to True which mean that courses with visibility “none” will not be excluded from the search results.

We at RaccoonGang are using mentioned filtering for courses with visibility “none” along with modification in the lms_filter_generator.py to exclude courses with visibility “about” in all our installations.
We’re assuming this behavior is the valid default one.

Questions to discuss

  • why the catalog filtering was disabled by default? Maybe we should toggle it back?
  • Why do the search results include courses with the visibility setting “about”? We’re ready to add changes to the filter generator to exclude both “none” and “about” courses from the search results.
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2 Likes
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Hi @Evgen_Dyudyunov

Having the catalog filtering enabled by default sounds like the right approach. How would you like to move this proposal forward? I would suggest taking it to the Product Working Group for comments, then taking it to the Build-Test-Release (BTR) Working Group for a more technical discussion on pros and cons. If both groups agree, then we could schedule a PR.

I agree that we should exclude both “none” and “about” from the course discovery page. It would be good to run it by Product and BTR too.

Any other suggestions would be welcome!

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@jmakowski could you help me to ping the right people from the working groups Dean mentioned above?

Meanwhile, I’ll ping in the #wg-product and #wg-build-test-release slack channels

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@Dean @Evgen_Dyudyunov

I have commented about this in the BTR meeting notes, adding it here as well.

  • I first though that there is no way to override edx-search filttering so I came up with PR, but then, I discovered it’s not needed and there is just a setting to do just that :sweat_smile:
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Thanks for gathering all that info together @ghassan

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Thank you @ghassan !

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Hi @jmakowski

Are there any updates from the wg-product regarding this issue?

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@jmakowski friendly reminder ^