4.30. Retrieving Extended Profile Metadata#

This topic describes how an Open edX Administrator can configure their system to retrieve extended profile metadata stored as part of a user’s profile.

Note

Modifying the software to persist or display the extended profile metadata is beyond the scope of this document. This section describes how to enable and include the retrieval of extended profile metadata through the User API.

4.30.1. Overview#

The User API has a mechanism to accept and persist extra user metadata as part of a user’s profile. This is called the Extended Profile. While there is no special configuration required to enable the storage of this data, it won’t be returned by default.

To enable retrieval of Extended Profile data, an Open edX Administrator must update their instance’s Site Configuration.

4.30.1.1. Updating the Site Configuration#

An Open edX instance’s Site Configuration is managed via Django Admin. To update the configuration properties for a site, follow these steps.

  1. Sign in to the Django administration console for your instance. For example, http://{your_instance_url}/admin.

  2. Select Site Configurations.

  3. From the Site Configurations menu, select the site you want to update.

  4. Enter a new configuration property in the Site values section named extended_profile_fields. Ensure that the new property is in valid JavaScript Object Notion (JSON) format.

    Consider the following example where we want to retrieve an extended profile field named occupation.

    {
  "PLATFORM_NAME": "Online University",
  ...other_fields,
  "extended_profile_fields": [
    "occupation"
  ]
}

  5. Select Save.

After the updated Site Configuration is saved, when making a GET request to the User REST API, we should see the occupation field returned in our requests:

{
  ...other_fields,
  "extended_profile": [
    {
      "field_name": "occupation",
      "field_value": {
        "name": "Organic Farmer"
      }
    }
  ]
}