User-specific study resources

[googlecloudplatform]

User-specific study resources

[kuoyuchi]

To elaborate more, I'm less concern about adding the API implementation on backend. Either overloading the existing /resources call with additional optional params or implementing a new /getUserResources sounds fine to me. What we do need is the app to pass either userId or participantId to backend on the call (along with the proper tokens).

[SR-btc]

@kuoyuchi

1. Do these resources need to be fetched from the resources set that is configured on the WCP ? If so, that would not be possible because no Participant/User Info is or should be stored on the WCP. Also WCP APIs do not validate mobile app participants/users in any way.
2. We dont think we can overload the existing /resources call with optional params for the same reason
3. If these resources are elsewhere, would they be mapped to Participant IDs or User IDs already?
4. As of today, User ID calls go to Participant Datastore only and Participant ID calls go to either Participant Datastore, Cloud Storage or Response Datastore. So we would recommend that we use one of these to store the resources - and you'd probably want to map them to Participant ID only and not the User ID because you are probably doing the mapping based on some response or other data-point related to the Participant.
5. if we could get Resource response data to this new call in the same format that we do today, we can conjoin that list of resources with the WCP list, and display it in the app. Assuming we agree on an order (e.g. all non WCP resources followed by all WCP ones)
6. Limitations with such non -WCP resources: We cant have New Resource Push Notification that typically come from the WCP for these kind of resources. And also, any data validations we do in the WCP will not be covered.

Please let us know your thoughts on the above points so we can confirm a timeframe to make this change.

[SR-btc]

I also meant to mention, if we need to do more than a short-term workaround and support this as a platform feature, we'd need to know the use-cases for which types of participant data points are likely to be used as a basis to map resources to participants. Example: if it is a response to text choice type of questions.

We would accordingly then add functionality to the WCP to be able to mark questions whose responses must be used for tailored resource delivery to participants. And in the Resources section of the WCP, we would provide the ability to map resources to responses of such questions. That way a participant who answers X to a certain text choice question, for example, would be delivered a certain resource meant to go with X. So we would be able to achieve tailored participant-specific resource delivery in that way without using Participant ID for WCP APIs.

This kind of functionality is of course a full-fledged feature by itself, requiring concerted effort and time of its own for design, development and testing, and so not an ideal target for a short-term
solution.

[kuoyuchi]

Thanks for the info, @SR-btc . To clarify on some points:

• We don't need those resources to be configurable on WCP. We are thinking of storing something like <StudyId>-<InstitutionId>.pdf in a Cloud Storage bucket and implement a standalone service to access that.
• These data doesn't need to be stored on WCP and we can take care of the backend implementation for this.

We are thinking of this design:

• FE changes /StudyMetaData/resources to /StudyMetaData/getUserResources and add (userId,accessToken,clientToken) to header for this call.
• BE ingress controller routes /StudyMetaData/getUserResources to a new InstitutionInfo server. Other /StudyMetaData/* calls remain unchanged.
• The new InstitutionInfo server serves /StudyMetaData/getUserResources by:
  *** Validate (userId,accessToken,clientToken) by calling /AuthServer/tokenAuthentication.
  *** If validation succeeds, lookup institutionId for this user (from a separate database that we introduce).
  *** If institutionId is found, try to serve <StudyId>-<InstitutionId>.pdf from Cloud Storage.
  *** Otherwise, fallback to calling /StudyMetaData/resources from InstitutionInfo server and return the result to app.

Mainly want to see if this makes sense on a high level. Thanks!

[SR-btc]

Just posting as FYI -we have a mail thread running on this.

[zohrehj]

closing this as we are not currently planning to implement this in study builder