feat: Add slot for whole application

[xitij2000]

Description

Adds a slot wrapping the entire application.

While the first two slots have pretty obvious use-cases the third has a use-case that propped up while trying to implement a way to have one plugin slot react to another. For instance, to inject a button in one slot that causes an action in another slot.

If developing code in the main application this would be through some type of shared state, for instance, using redux, or a context manager. Using redux from a plugin is a complex task and would require injecting a slice somehow, which doesn't fit in with the PluginSlot mechanism.

What we can do with a correctly-placed plugin-slot though, is to wrap in the entire app inside a context manager that can carry context for the plugin. That is the approach we've gone with here.

If this approach seems reasonable, it might make sense to have something similar for all MFEs.

An alternate approach is to use a package like: https://hookstate.js.org/docs/global-state/ (as recommended by @farhaanbukhsh) This would allow sharing state without needing to wrap the application; however, it introduces a new package as part of a plugin and that can introduce hard-to-resolve conflicts. If this approach is preferable, then it might make sense to have the package as part of the platform so conflicts can be avoided.

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[openedx-webhooks]

Thanks for the pull request, @xitij2000!

This repository is currently maintained by @openedx/2u-tnl.

Once you've gone through the following steps feel free to tag them in a comment and let them know that your changes are ready for engineering review.

🔘 Get product approval

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[codecov]

Codecov Report

Attention: Patch coverage is 0% with 3 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Project coverage is 93.53%. Comparing base (a43027b) to head (1eb47c7).

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
src/plugin-slots/AuthoringAppSlot/index.tsx	0.00%	3 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master    #1799      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   93.54%   93.53%   -0.02%     
==========================================
  Files        1136     1137       +1     
  Lines       23205    23208       +3     
  Branches     5000     5000              
==========================================
  Hits        21708    21708              
- Misses       1421     1424       +3     
  Partials       76       76              

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[brian-smith-tcril]

trying to implement a way to have one plugin slot react to another

Is it possible to implement this without wrapping the entire application in a PluginSlot by utilizing React Context in env.config.jsx?

[xitij2000]

trying to implement a way to have one plugin slot react to another

Is it possible to implement this without wrapping the entire application in a PluginSlot by utilizing React Context in env.config.jsx?

The context provider still needs to wrap all the components that need to share data, and they could be placed anywhere, so it needs to be as high up in the chain as possible.

I also feel something like this could be implemented in frontend-platform instead so it's available to all MFEs. One way would be to just add the wrapper to frontend-platform, and another would be to add another plugin mechanism for plugins to provide additional context wrappers.

[brian-smith-tcril]

Wrapping an entire application (either in an individual MFE or within frontend-platform) doesn't match up with the intended use of frontend-plugin-framework slots.

That being said, I understand the need for plugins to be able to share information.

One reasonable path forward would be to:

• Update frontend-platform's AppProvider to include a React context provider for a "PluginContext"
  • This would need to be flexible - something similar to what is described in this blog post (https://mtm.dev/react-child-update-context/) would likely work
• Document how to use the PluginContext in FPF plugins with a draft ADR
  • This should include best practices for using context, such as namespacing context variables with their associated plugin to avoid naming conflicts

[farhaanbukhsh]

Hello @brian-smith-tcril @xitij2000 do you think we can wrap this up before teak code freeze(April 24th)? cc: @crathbun428 @bmtcril

[xitij2000]

@brian-smith-tcril

I think the PluginContext approach makes a lot of sense. The only downside I see is that it puts all plugins into a single context, meaning that any change of state by any plugin will re-render all plugins. Also, a single state means that plugins need to properly namespace their settings, and ideally this is something that the context API should promote.

The hookstate approach relies on an external package, but has fewer of these issues, so might be worth exploring as well.

@farhaanbukhsh For now would it make sense to move this to hookstate to avoid blocking on this? I can make a quick PR wth the change.

[farhaanbukhsh]

@xitij2000 yup I think we should go with the hookstate solution to get this working and then we can have a ticket to add an ADR if we have the budget and time for it.

[xitij2000]

@farhaanbukhsh open-craft/frontend-plugin-aspects#2