Draft: feat: REST APIs for import functionality

[NiedielnitsevIvan]

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[kdmccormick]

The REST API needs major rework. It is providing too much information in some cases and too little information in others.

The API currently lets its clients start a staging task, start an import task, and view the structure of a staged import. However, I don't see any way that the API gives them an ability to check what the status of the tasks are, whether they succeeded, and if they fail, any error information. This status-related information is significantly more important than being able to see the structure of the staged content. The API user doesn't need to even know that content staging exists as an intermediate format; from their perspective, it would be fine if it were all one step.

The ability to query status is provided, with pre-made REST API endpoints, by django-user-tasks. Using this framework requires that all the work occurs in a single Celery task. Yes, the work currently occurs in two celery tasks (stage content, and import staged content); however, rather than two Celery tasks, this could be a single Celery task which calls two synchronous API methods. django-user-tasks even allows you to set custom status messages, negating the need for the detailed ImportStatus enumeration. The Import model would have a OneToOneField(to=UserTaskStatus) so that each import event is related to a single UserTaskStatus.

I'm sorry to give this feedback so late. I wish I had been more insistent about using django-user-tasks when we first talked about it. In the future, we should agree on the REST API design early on before any implementation (beyond protoype) is started.

[kdmccormick]

Suggested change

	path('api/import_from_modulestore/',
	include('cms.djangoapps.import_from_modulestore.views.urls', namespace='import_from_modulestore_api')),
	path('api/import_from_modulestore/',
	include('cms.djangoapps.import_from_modulestore.rest_api.urls', namespace='import_from_modulestore_api')),

To be consistent with other edx-platform apps, the import_from_modulestore/views/ folder should be called import_from_modulestore/rest_api/

[kdmccormick]

@NiedielnitsevIvan @cmltaWt0 I have a draft in progress of the requested rework. When you're online, please focus on the Python APIs PR, and I will post the REST API rework as soon as it's ready.

[kdmccormick]

Here's my WIP PR for the REST APIs: #36582

[kdmccormick]

@NiedielnitsevIvan @cmltaWt0 We discussed in named release planning that this and the Django Admin PR can both merge up to two weeks after the code cutoff and be backported into Teak. So, we just need to merge these by Thu May 8th.

I'm going to focus on other work (#36275) for the rest of this week, and then I'll be available next week for code review and sync-ups on this PR and the Django Admin PR.

[mphilbrick211]

Hi @NiedielnitsevIvan! Is this pull request still in progress, or can it be closed?

[kdmccormick]

Superseded by kdmccormick#32