Catalog syncing behavior with enterprise-catalog service

Status

Accepted

Context

We would like to have a way to reuse a saved set of courses configured by a query and use them in multiple catalogs across customers.

Decisions

Sync catalog/customer data with enterprise-catalog As the catalog data is saved in both edx-enterprise and enterprise-catalog, we need to make sure that catalog data is consistent across both. In the context of edx-enterprise, changes to EnterpriseCatalogQuery and EnterpriseCustomerCatalog will be propagated to their counterparts in the enterprise-catalog service.

Consequences

EnterpriseCatalogQuery Sync Process The enterprise-catalog service enforces a uniqueness constraint for the content_filter field, and so edx-enterprise must enforce it as well or the sync operation will fail and the entities will be out of sync with each other.

In the Django Admin console, whenever a new EnterpriseCatalogQuery is created, or an existing one edited, we first query enterprise-catalog to see if its content_filter is already in use (by calculating the content_filter hash via a call to enterprise-catalog, and then attempting to retrieve an existing catalog query from enterprise-catalog by that hash). If the new content_filter is unique, we will save the changes and propagate them to enterprise-catalog.

If the content_filter is not unique, we display an error on the EnterpriseCatalogQuery edit page and don’t commit the change.

EnterpriseCustomerCatalog Sync Process In the Django Admin console, whenever a EnterpriseCustomerCatalog is created, or an existing one is edited, we simply pass the changes on to enterprise-catalog without doing any checks for duplicates.

When it comes to custom content_filter fields attached to EnterpriseCustomerCatalog objects, enterprise-catalog doesn’t care if they are non-unique, and will simply update the corresponding catalog entity to point to the catalog query that matches the content_filter.