Arch Tea Time: 2020-08-13

Rebranding edX.org and its i18n implications - carryover from last week

• edX is gonna go through a re-branding effort, what kind of implications if any will this have for how we manage i18n.

FYI: Paragon Proposed Changes

FYI: Signals as Hooks for extensions

FYI: Core Committers Phase 1 Goals

Arch Roadmap update

• Needed Architecture Investments wheels are in motion. Not planned right now:

  • Platform Frontend APIs, including API Practices

  • Codebase Organization

  • Documentation (a lot more to be done here)

• Arch OGSP FY21 (DRAFT)

What does a good django model set of unit tests look like? - asked by JJ, who will not be able to attend but will read the notes

• Specific example that I’m working on (also applies to the question on validations below): https://github.com/edx/ecommerce/pull/3087/files#diff-6aa12e1c48e74f5bcc0bd29fabdf3185R126-R173

  • Background info: I’m attempting to test the swap_states(cls) class method defined in the model. There are 3 possible rows in the table - “New”, “Current”, and “Discard”. There can only be one row in each state, so this method would be run (before deleting the existing “Discard” row & creating a “New” row) in order to move the existing row(s) along. I’m looking to set up a few different test scenarios, e.g. test case with 0 existing rows in the db, test case with 3 existing rows in the db, and I’d prefer to not do the setup inside the test itself (if the test fails, I want to know that the logic somewhere has changed, and not that my database state setup is broken, which is what would happen in that PR today)

  • Additional background: This is really easy to do in RoR

What kinds of validations/validation patterns do we use on models (if any?) It seems like Django models will let you save invalid models, so what do we do to protect against bad data in the DB, if we’re not going through UI form fields to save models (e.g. we’re invoking methods to save stuff purely in the backend, like from a cronjob) and we can’t add validations in the DB itself? - also asked by JJ, who will not be able to attend this tea time but will read the notes

• Example: You can save a model that doesn’t conform to the specified Enum (“choices”) values (https://github.com/edx/ecommerce/pull/3087/files#diff-ecfeeacce0f0764c9d65c761d8600f4eR143) from the command line, per Slack thread https://edx-internal.slack.com/archives/CD89W7Z7F/p1597248864457200?thread_ts=1597245996.449800&cid=CD89W7Z7F)

• Additional background: This is really easy to do in RoR + you have to try pretty hard to save invalid models in RoR