Google Drive & Calendar XBlock

This XBlock allows embedding of Google documents and calendar, within an edX course.

Installation

Install the requirements into the python virtual environment of your edx-platform installation by running the following command from the root folder:

$ make requirements

Enabling in Studio

You can enable the Google Drive & Calendar XBlock in studio through the advanced settings.

1. From the main page of a specific course, navigate to Settings -> Advanced Settings from the top menu.

2. Check for the advanced_modules policy key, and add "google-document" and "google-calendar" to the policy value list.

3. Click the “Save changes” button.

Workbench installation and settings

Install to the workbench’s virtualenv by running the following command form the google-drive repo root:

pip install -r requirements/base.in
pip install -e .

Running the workbench

$ ./manage.py runserver 8000

Access it at http://localhost:8000/.

Running tests

From google-drive directory, run the tests with the following command:

$ pytest

If you want to run only the integration or the unit tests, append the directory to the command. You can also run separate modules in this manner.

$ pytest tests/unit

To see the coverage report in HTML format, run the tests using the following command:

$ make coverage

If you have not installed the xblock-sdk in the active virtualenv, you might also have to prepend PYTHONPATH=".:/path/to/xblock" to the command above. (/path/to/xblock is the path to the xblock-sdk, where the workbench resides).

Changes to be documented

1. Calendar width is set to 100% of parent element’s width; this optimizes the display of google document content within the LMS user interface

2. Max width of Google images is set to 100% to prevent images from overflowing outside the parent element’s boundaries

3. Since Google WordProcessing documents and Spreadsheets don’t allow users to explicitly define width and height, their width is set to 100%. Also, min height is set to 450px, so that documents and/or spreadsheets with larger number of rows are displayed in their natural size. Overflow scroll is automatically turned on when the height of the document becomes larger than the height of the parent.

Validation

Each time a character is added to or removed from Google Calendar ID, validation takes place. Analogically, validation takes place for embedded code of Google Drive File.

1. Google calendar IDs are being validated against a regular expression. IDs must contain at least one ‘@’ character, with at least one character on each side of it, ie. ‘a@a’.

2. Embedded code of Google Drive file is being validated on the server side, by checking the status code of the HTTP response. Since error status codes start with 400, it’s assumed that each status code that’s larger than or equal to 400 states that file is invalid. If for any reason exception occurs while getting an HTTP response, error code is returned, thus overriding default signalization that is invoked by edx platform when the 500 status code is reported.

Accessibility (a11y)

For users with a visual impairment:

1. Iframes in which Google calendars and Google Drive files (except images) are shown now have title attribute with alternative text content which describes what the iframe contains.

2. Images have alt attribute which contains alternative text that has the same purpose as the title attribute of an iframe has

Analytics

For analytics purposes, each time an image or iframe containing a calendar or Google Drive file is loaded, an event will be triggered.

There are two types of events:

1. edx.googlecomponent.calendar.displayed (if an iframe containing a Google calendar is loaded)

2. edx.googlecomponent.document.displayed (if an image or an iframe containing a Google Drive File is loaded)

License

The Google Drive & Calendar XBlocks are available under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).