Export/Import for Courses and Activities

[pluma]

Description

Currently the JSON content of course activities can be copy-pasted to assist admins in maintaining local backups. This feature will extend the course admin UI with options for exporting courses and activities and for re-importing these exported courses and activities.

Implementation Considerations

The exported courses and activities will be generated as downloadable bundle files using a background process. Users should treat the bundle files as opaque. Manual editing and creation of bundle files is not in the scope of this feature.

Activities are identified by UUIDs. We should consider randomizing UUIDs during import to avoid conflicts when importing an activity into the same course it was exported from.

Exam activities can reference other activities. These references will need to be restored on import and may require manual intervention by the importing admin. The export file should include human-readable metadata to help restoring these references instead of showing raw UUIDs.

We may eventually want to allow replacing an activity or course from an exported bundle to allow for easier migration of courses and activities between live and staging systems. We should take this into consideration.

We may eventually provide a mechanism to retain duplicates of courses or activities as online backups. We should take this into consideration.

Activities can specify other activities as prerequisites. If we want to maintain these prerequisites across re-imports, we may need similar intervention and affordances to what we need for handling references in exams.

Courses can be nested. Exporting a course containing other course will require recursively exporting all courses contained within. Admins may want to export a course without any courses contained in it so we should provide both options if applicable.

Exporting/importing courses and activities will use the existing permissions for creating/modifying courses.