Move consenting setup to a consent manager

[p2]

Code used to setup and configure consenting could be moved to a new consent manager class. This would free up the app delegate and allow for easy customization by subclassing. For simple tie in to the app, AppCore may ask the app delegate, which should be adhering to a new consent manager provider protocol, for the consent manager.

cf. #41

[p2]

I have started work on this on https://github.com/chb/AppCore/tree/feature/consent_manager

[jwe-apple]

I'm skeptical about this component but willing to be convinced. What does it add to what's in ResearchKit, apart from a file format and/or helpers for locating files on disk relative to the configuration?

[p2]

@jwe-apple It allows to drop in a JSON file and some resources (especially those nice videos created for the sample apps), write a bit of code and stand up the whole consenting flow. That is very useful to have IMHO.

I don't know how much that's worth, for now I'm just trying to fish it out of the bowl so I can use it standalone.

[jwe-apple]

Hm. Base ResearchKit supports loading consent from a JSON file using ORKESerialization. And it actually does all the video presentation. I'd almost rather you tried using the ResearchKit stuff directly, and we can fix that if it doesn't fill your needs.

[p2]

@jwe-apple Guess I spent too much time in AppCore! I'll take a closer look at bare ResearchKit and will update here.

[p2]

@jwe-apple Is there an update on the status of moving ORKESerialization into RK?

[jwe-apple]

Make a good argument ;-)

[p2]

There's still some consenting logic dispersed over a few APCConsentXy classes and APCEligibleViewController. If we can instantiate a consenting ORKTask from file and maybe add a manager object – or similar – to ResearchKit, we could indeed tease this apart and move it out of AppCore. Let me take a closer look.

[jwe-apple]

@p2 Sure, thanks!

[p2]

Still working on this, have been busy with backend aspects.

[p2]

As it stands currently, APCAppDelegate has a huge method to deserialize the consent task from JSON and instantiate ORKConsentSectionType instances – which is only used in -[APCProfileViewController showConsentSlides] to review consent slides after enrolling. A copy of the same huge method lives in APCConsentTask to instantiate itself. This has been consolidated on the feature branch.

The other part is the eligibility check and the logic afterwards, which to date is not handled by ResearchKit. People wanting to re-use the eligibility view controller and the “yes you're eligible, join now” and “no you can't join” views – with the former starting the consent task handled by ResearchKit – currently must use APCAppDelegate. The consent manager would alleviate this. Subclassing the manager would allow to customize the behaviors that currently are put into the initialization dictionary (kReviewConsentActionPDF and co).

In the meantime, this is what I'm using in our app. To handle the whole flow with ResearchKit alone we'd need:

• JSON deserialization in ResearchKit:master.
• A view controller that takes a list of eligibility criteria, then routes either to consenting or a "not eligible" view controller.
• APCConsentTask has overridden stepAfterStep:withResult: and does some gymnastics there; could probably be recreated with a navigable task, which if it can be deserialized from JSON removes the need for the subclass.

[p2]

Closing as we've moved away from AppCore for this.