Adapt Learning Community: Trickle - Enable on Child Blocks not functioning in Authoring Tool

I've been trying to use Trickle in the authoring tool on some quite lengthy articles, but I'm hitting a problem in that the option Enable on Child Blocks does not seem to be functioning when enabled. The blocks are still using whatever settings are the default.

I've tried completely removing the extension, then re-adding and ONLY entering and editing the Article layer, but this is still not working.

Is this a known issue or am I missing something obvious? I can see in the documentation that the block settings will override the Article if set but it seems that even not touching the block at all is still leaving the defaults as "set" perhaps.

I'm using 10.3 of the authoring tool.

Many thanks

Tim

Is this a known issue or am I missing something obvious?

It's a known issue. When hand-editing the JSON in the Framework you can leave out settings you don't want (and easily copy-paste settings you want to re-use) but in the authoring tool it puts all settings from all active extensions in everywhere, using the default values. In some places (such as the bookmarking extension) we've used an 'inherit' value to work around this, but for something like this where you've what is essentially a boolean value it's quite a change to convert to a string. Any thoughts/solutions most welcome...

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Ah thank you that makes perfect sense - I did wonder if it was something like that.

It might be fiddly to implement but what about an additional boolean property at the block level along the lines of "overrideInherited" (instead of/in addition to the inherit at the article level), which if the article inherit is set to true, this is then tested first before applying any of the block properties?

e.g. 3 use cases:

- inherit is true, and override is false = block settings are ignored and inherited properties used

- inherit is true, and override is true = block settings are used as an override to the article props

- inherit is false = override value is ignored as settings are applied at block level anyway

Override would then be defaulted to false - on the assumption that if an author is wanting to use the inherit, they are more likely to leave the override to false in the majority of cases. If an author is not using inherit and applying settings at block level anyway, then the override option has no purpose so can be left false and ignored.

I haven't looked at the code for the trickle extension much but happy to have a stab and contribute something to the project (I have a few components I'm working on and hoping to share at some point).

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Yeah, it's something we've been trying to figure out how best to do for a while now. There may be a simpler workaround for this, there's actually a re-write of this extension going on (see this PR) so I have mentioned this there.

There's also a sort-of related issue here.

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