tab_configuration data missing from some records in courses table

[mclark19]

Hi all -- The courses table in DAP has a tab_configuration column which holds a JSON array of various configurations for the course. We recently decided to try to take advantage of that information to determine which files are visible to students (one component of which is whether or not the "Files" section of a course space is visible to students or not, irrespective of the status of individual files). 

But we noticed that we have a fair number of records that don't actually have information in that column (e.g., "(null)") and were wondering if that is something unique to our processing pipeline (we are not using the DAP client) or if that is behavior that others have seen as well?

[stimme]

@mclark19 I've seen the same thing. I believe it's expected behavior when a course's navigation menu has never been altered. You might spot check some of those courses to confirm. When the tab_configuration is null, course Files should become visible to students once it contains published files.

[phanley]

This may be my mind misremembering/inventing but when I worked with the Tabs API I thought that the return was sort of a diff from default, i.e. when a course is created the tab API would return an empty document until a change was made to tab order, etc.

I checked the API docs and there's no mention of that, so I don't know if I invented it, read it somewhere else, etc

[mclark19]

Thanks @stimme and @phanley -- that means the column is still informative even if blank. Good to know.