Mixed Modulestore
A note about this document: We've changed how the Mongo database is accessed to better handle versioning of courses. This will be transparent to you if you are using xBlocks, but may be important if you are working deeper in the code.
In preparation for enabling use of the Split Modulestore, we have updated edx-platform so accesses to modulestores in LMS and Studio are now directed through the MixedModuleStore.
The MixedModuleStore is a server-wide singleton with a pluggable API where one or more courseware persistence providers can be accessed through a single interface. Higher layers can call the MixedModuleStore with UsageKeys or CourseKeys and know that their calls will be routed to the correct corresponding underlying store.
Each server instance configures its MixedModuleStore with database access parameters and its preferred ordered list of providers.
Prior to this work, Studio code had to be cognizant of the various Modulestores and explicitly request Draft or Mongo (a.k.a 'direct') depending on the revision and category of the XBlock it was operating on. The diagram below illustrates this.
Additionally, logic for traversing hierarchies when doing CRUD operations on XBlocks used to be done in higher layers (in Studio).
Also, each server instance had duplicated configuraton settings for the various modulestores.
Now, all code goes through the common MixedModuleStore API, and there is a clearer distinction between modulestore-level logic (hierarchy traversal, handling revisions) and higher-level logic (handling XBlock exceptional cases such as for StaticTabs).
Server Configuration Settings
Since different servers may have differing default preferences for the revisions they require, we have
introduced a new server configuration setting (MODULESTORE_BRANCH) for specifying this preference, with currently supported values being draft-preferred (set by Studio and Preview) and published-only (set by LMS).
Additionally, we have changed the data structure for Options[stores] in the MixedModuleStore setting from a dict to a list, so an ordered list of store preferences can be specified. Here is an example configuration setting for the MixedModuleStore:
"MODULESTORE": {
"default": {
"ENGINE": "xmodule.modulestore.mixed.MixedModuleStore",
"OPTIONS": {
"mappings": {
'edX/toy/2012_Fall': 'xml',
'another/xml/course': 'xml',
'can/specify_courses_of/other_types': 'mongo'
},
"reference_type": "Location",
"stores": [
{
"NAME": "mongo",
"DOC_STORE_CONFIG": {
"collection": "modulestore",
"db": "test",
"host": ["localhost"],
"password": "password",
"port": 27017,
"user": "edxapp"
},
"ENGINE": "xmodule.modulestore.mongo.DraftMongoModuleStore",
"OPTIONS": {
"collection": "modulestore",
"db": "test",
"default_class": "xmodule.hidden_module.HiddenDescriptor",
"fs_root": "test_root/data",
"host": ["localhost"],
"password": "password",
"port": 27017,
"render_template": "edxmako.shortcuts.render_to_string",
"user": "edxapp"
}
},
{
"NAME": "xml",
"ENGINE": "xmodule.modulestore.xml.XMLModuleStore",
"OPTIONS": {
"data_dir": "edx-platform/data",
"default_class": "xmodule.hidden_module.HiddenDescriptor"
}
}
]
}
}
},
Overriding the Branch Setting via a contextmanager
Callers to the modulestore may, at (rare) times, need to override the server's default branch setting for certain operations. For such cases, we have introduced a contextmanager named store_branch_setting to temporarily override the default branch setting.
# sample usage of the store_branch_setting context manager
# export only the published content
with store_branch_setting(course.runtime.modulestore, Branch.draft_preferred):
course.add_xml_to_node(root)
Optional Revision Parameter
In other cases, callers may need more detail control of the specific revisions of an XBlock that they want to access. For such usage, we have provided an optional revision parameter in certain modulestore methods so the caller has more control of which revisions are queried. Currently, the following methods support a revision parameter: has_item, get_item, get_items, get_parent_location, and delete_item.
The branch and revision constants can be found in the ModuleStoreEnum class:
class ModuleStoreEnum(object):
"""
A class to encapsulate common constants that are used with the various modulestores.
"""
class Type(object):
"""
The various types of modulestores provided
"""
split = 'split'
mongo = 'mongo'
xml = 'xml'
class RevisionOption(object):
"""
Revision constants to use for Module Store operations
Note: These values are passed into store APIs and only used at run time
"""
# both DRAFT and PUBLISHED versions are queried, with preference to DRAFT versions
draft_preferred = 'rev-opt-draft-preferred'
# only DRAFT versions are queried and no PUBLISHED versions
draft_only = 'rev-opt-draft-only'
# # only PUBLISHED versions are queried and no DRAFT versions
published_only = 'rev-opt-published-only'
# all revisions are queried
all = 'rev-opt-all'
class Branch(object):
"""
Branch constants to use for stores, such as Mongo, that have only
2 branches: DRAFT and PUBLISHED
Note: These values are taken from server configuration settings,
so should not be changed without alerting DevOps
"""
draft_preferred = 'draft-preferred'
published_only = 'published-only'
class BranchName(object):
"""
Branch constants to use for stores, such as Split, that have named branches
"""
draft = 'draft-branch'
published = 'published-branch'
A Smarter Mongo
As part of this effort, we have updated the Mongo (and Draft) modulestore implementation so it is smarter about which revisions to update and automatically traversing the hierarchy when appropriate. In particular, the publish, unpublish, delete_item, and convert_to_draft methods automatically affect all nodes in the subtree. The delete_item and get_parent_location methods are now smarter about determining which revision to operate on, by default.
All of these above changes will help us on our way to enabling the SplitModulestore (just a hop and a skip away).