Objective
Refactoring the player to extract the business logic from the Rendering of the Player so that it becomes reusable in other services.
Background
The current QuML Player is an Angular App that outputs a web component. A lot of the functionalities as described below are part of the Android Components.
Fetching the QuestionSet, Sections and getting individual Questions Metadata
Playing through the Questions (linear or non-linear)
Events like when to send Hints, Timeouts, Errors are part of the application state
Telemetry
All of the above is business logic and can be extracted out as common code and not be as tightly coupled with Angular. Making this loosely coupled with enable the common code to be reused in variety of other JS frameworks like React, React Native, Vue etc and will provide developers with basic tools on which to build their own QuML players. The said extraction can be ported to other languages by the community to further use the QuML spec in creative ways.
One of the use-case that can be enabled using this is for dissemination of questions in a chat based platform like UCI. Questions being sent one at a time.
Solution
Dividing the current structure of code into two parts question player and renderer. The player and renderer will communicate with each other through
Events pushed by the player async using the EventEmitter. These are to
abstract out the side effects of state mutation from the renderer.
This also allows for external mutations outside of renderer to happen.
This also helps when in the use cases where the renderer mutates the state through some other means - like an webhook response which can be hooked up with the APIs exposed by player.
APIs exposed by the player to mutate the state by the renderer.
This follows a unidirectional approach to update state rather than the bidirectional one to reduce complexity in debugging. So the renderer updates state using the Player API and the player then schedules any events if needed due to star.
Core features to be extracted
Fetching of a collection
Iterator for QuestionSet, Sections or any other collection
State Management for the following entities
Player
User
Events Management - Store and emit appropriate events for the renderer when the state is mutated by the renderer.
Entry and Exit (Question Set, Section, Question)
Telemetry
Hints
Attempts
Errors
Time Limits
Replay
Persistence Layer Interfaces
Generic metadata storage object
Interfaces and Classes
The pseduo/live code can be tracked here - https://github.dev/ChakshuGautam/sunbird-quml-player/tree/player-refactor. The code is in the folder refactor
.
Integration Guide for Angular - WIP
Open Questions
Should the player be allow for a callback based event processing? For example creating a telemetry event and sending it through event callback?
Prerequisites
A couple of things that need to be closed before the refactoring starts
100% code coverage on
main-component
Testing script (npm) to watch all tests.
Next Steps
Get all the event schemas validated from Kartheek and Vivek.
Check if the APIs are enough or not on the
Player.ts
.