Page Comparison

Introduction:

Platform enabled us, creating Collections by adding edge between content nodes. But, handling reads or writes when the collection graph has hundreds of nodes became difficult. This wiki has the design and implementation details about data model changes to support scale.

Problem statement:

When a textbook having hundreds of children constructing and returning the hierarchy structure or updating the hierarchy structure taking too long time. If this textbook is already published, in this case it is more complex to identify and fetch the hierarchy structure because, the graph structure will have published and current edit copy nodes.

A textbook having ~400 children taking ~8.5sec to fetch it's hierarchy.
A textbook having ~400 children taking 10 min to publish.

Key Design Problems:

Creating unit nodes in graph which always used under root.

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Introduction:

This wiki explains the current structure for collections and the proposed structure changes for optimization and scale.

Background & Problem statement:

The textbook is realized by Collection node in the Knowledge Platform. The textbook with chapters, sections, and sub-sections created as a sub-graph. Chapter, Section, and Sub-section are also collection nodes, and all these are children (Ex: TextbookUnit, CollectionUnit, CourseUnit etc,.) for Textbook. The textbook children are always accessible via textbook only, and these are not available for other textbooks to add and use. So, they are not giving much functional value.

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Publishing

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a textbook will check the status (not live or unlisted) of all its children and triggers publish for them also. Publishing the textbook children is required because they are nodes in Knowledge platform. Due to this,

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Editing a published collection creates more unit nodes.

On a published collection, any changes to the content nodes of collection will create it's image and apply the changes on image node. With this, there are more nodes and relations in the collection hierarchy structure.

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Design:

Also, when the collection content published it should add relation between the resources and root collection object with metadata.

Graph unit nodes as body

Collection structure storing as body in Cassandra will improve the performance to get hierarchy and reduce the complexity of handling collection graph structure.

ECML content body has multiple stages and manifest. Similarly Collection body will have metadata of each node as nodes map and hierarchy.

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the publish process takes more time for textbooks.

A textbook having ~400 children takes 10 min to publish.

Knowledge platform maintain two versions of a content (edit and live). Any changes for a live version content applies to the edit version content. Having this for textbook creating more nodes and relations in the sub-graph. When a textbook having hundreds of children and some of them with live and edit version, it will increase the complexity and affect the performance to read hierarchy of a textbook with the mode - edit vs. live.

A textbook having ~400 children takes ~8.5sec to fetch the hierarchy.

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Key Design Problems:

A simple data format to define children of a collection.
Collection hierarchy data for mode value - edit vs live.
Performance improvement for operations (read and write) on Collection.
Performance improvement for collection publish.
Data migration of the Collection

Design:

Collection hierarchy as body

Based on the mimeType of content, its actual data is available in the cloud-storage or Cassandra. After publishing a collection its hierarchy structure (JSON) doesn't change (static). So, as part of the collection publish process, the hierarchy generated and saved to Cassandra. With this, the hierarchy read API for live content performance improved.

cloud-store - application/pdf, video/mp4, application/vnd.ekstep.html-archive, application/epub, etc,.
cassandra - application/vnd.ekstep.ecml-archive

ECML content represented using stages and manifest. Similarly, a Collection can be represented using nodes and hierarchy. So, Collection's actual data stored in Cassandra as JSON.

ECML Content

Collection

Stages

It defines the slides/pages and all the objects in each slide.

Nodes

It defines children of the collection with metadata.

Manifest

It defines the assets used in ECML content.

Hierarchy

It defines the tree structure and order of the children.

Code Block

language	js

{

   "manifest" : {
       "media": [{...}],
   },
   "stages": [{...}],
   ....
}

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Code Block

language	js

{
    "nodes": {
        "tb_1": {
            "name": "TextBook 1",
            "contentType": "TextBook",
            "visibility": "Default",
            "status": "Draft",
            .....
        },
        "tbu_1": {
            "name": "Unit -1",
            "contentType":"TextBookUnit",
            "visibility": "Parent",
            ....
        },
        ...
    },
    "hierarchy": {
       "tb_1": ["tbu_1", "tbu_2", ...],
       "tbu_1": ["tbu_1_1",...],
       ...
    }
}

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Structure for collection

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based on mode - edit vs. live

The

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live version of the collection

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For the content before publishing more writes/updates will happen and after publishing more reads will happen. To support this, we will have different structure of data for the body before and after.

After publishing we always read the textbook hierarchy or it's children hierarchy (units with visibility: Parent). So, saving textbook full hierarchy in a column and all its children full hierarchy (for each) in another column in hierarchy_store.content_hierarchy.

Before publishing or when the collection is in edit mode, writes are more so, nodes and hierarchy as keys and nodes having only metadata of each node as map (identifier as key) and hierarchy having only its next level children using identifier will help making updates easy.

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Note: In case of deleting a node from the hierarchy structure we should apply below logic to remove it from nodes map.

if visibility: Parent - remove.

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body is always used only for consumption. The edit version body will have a lot of change with the update operations. So, both versions require a different format of the body as JSON to maintain them easily. The body structure of the collection should have minimal transformations for reads and writes.

Edit version - Will have nodes as a flat list containing metadata of each node and hierarchy as a map (key - parent id, value: children ids list).
Live version - Will have a nested JSON representing the metadata and hierarchy structure together. A property with name children used to list the children content. Also, for each child collection in this, the hierarchy stored separately.

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ES indexing of the collection and its children

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Currently, collection and its children are nodes in the Knowledge platform graph DB. So, any change in its metadata or hierarchy structure synced to ES using the transaction events generated by Neo4J plugin. But with the above design, Collection represented as a node and its children saved in Cassandra. So, only the collection's metadata will sync to ES.

With existing use cases, the children of a collection required in ES only after publishing it. So, publish process will apply changes for

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children of a collection. The children of a collection

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(other than resources or leaf nodes) identified by setting visibility property value as Parent. Below logic will be applied in publish operation of the collection to sync its children.

Search for all the documents from ES where visibility: Parent, parent: current collection id and compare Cassandra data and ES data

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- If a node available only in ES - delete the document from ES.

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- If a node available only in Cassandra - create a new document in ES.

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- If a node available in both - Update ES document using Cassandra metadata.

Publishing the Collection

With the above design, collection publish will become as simple as publishing an ECML content. It is because the collection is a single node and its hierarchy stored in Cassandra.

Below are the steps which will be executed as part of publish operation:

Read the collection body and extract the children of type collection.
Download app icon for each child collection.
Generate a pre-signed URL for ECAR of the collection. Update the status of children to Live/Unlisted and add this URL as download URL.
Generate manifest.json, create ECAR and upload to cloud-store using the above pre-signed URL.
Construct a nested hierarchy structure and save it in Cassandra.
Use the above hierarchy structure to update ES documents for children.
Add relations among collection node and the resources used in it.

Changes to API Spec:

It requires few changes to the existing Collection API Spec to support the above design. Below table has the details.

API Name	Current API	Proposed API	Details
Hierarchy Read	GET - content/v3/hierarchy/<sectionId>	GET - content/v3/hierarchy/textbookId/<bookmarkId>	With the current data model for a textbook, textbook's section is also a node in the graph. so, we don't need the textbook to identify the section. But, with the proposed design, we need to know the textbook and section id to fetch section details.

Conclusion:

Save collection hierarchy structure as body
Maintain a single structure of hierarchy for live and edit version.
Read Hierarchy API will be updated by adding textbook Id and bookmark Id in URL.
Index the nodes in the hierarchy structure into ES as part of publishing.

Versions Compared

Old Version 1

New Version Current

Key

Introduction:

Problem statement:

Key Design Problems:

Creating unit nodes in graph which always used under root.

Introduction:

Background & Problem statement:

Editing a published collection creates more unit nodes.

Design:

Graph unit nodes as body

Key Design Problems:

Design:

Collection hierarchy as body

Structure for collection

based on mode - edit vs. live

ES indexing of the collection and its children

Publishing the Collection

Changes to API Spec:

Conclusion: