<unprintable InsufficientSpecificationError object>

https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/7270

Thanks for your investigation - it was helpful.

The best way to fix this would be to catch the InsufficientSpecificationError and VersionConflictError exceptions thrown by split.py:_lookup_course() in the split.py:_find_course_assets() method - logging the error and returning an empty dict. This fix would encapsulate those errors within the Split modulestore - they aren't relevant to other modulestores. And a 404 error would be generated.

Both of the issues [TNL-1426, TNL-1425] started occurring at same time

This issue started occurring because the course author tried to add "Syllabus Template" in a course on Prod which includes asset from a different course Art101 that exists only on Prod-Edge so server should return 404.

But I believe the default "MongoModuleStore" on Prod is changed to "SplitMongoModuleStore" so when user tries to get an asset for a course which don't exist then "_find_course_assets" method of "SplitMongoModuleStore" is called and "_lookup_course" method of split raise InsufficientSpecificationError when course_key don't have 'version_guid', thats why user is getting 500 instead of 404.

should we catch InsufficientSpecificationError exception in contentserver middleware to return 404?