feat: add authz permission for the course authoring list

[dwong2708]

Refactor course access listing to single-pass hybrid AuthZ + legacy approach

Summary

This PR refactors get_courses_accessible_to_user to improve performance, readability, and maintainability by introducing a single-pass hybrid access evaluation model.

Instead of splitting courses into separate AuthZ and legacy pipelines and merging results afterward, this implementation evaluates access per course in a single pass, then performs a single batched query to retrieve the final course list.

Key Improvements

Single-pass access evaluation

• Replaced the dual pipeline (AuthZ vs legacy) with a unified loop.
• Each course is evaluated once using:
  - user_has_course_permission(...)
• Eliminates duplicated logic and merging complexity.

Scoped full scan to staff users only

• Staff users still require evaluating all courses (expected behavior).
• Non-staff users now operate only on candidate course keys, avoiding unnecessary full table scans.

if is_staff_user:
    candidate_keys = CourseOverview.get_all_courses().values_list("id", flat=True)
else:
    candidate_keys = _get_candidate_course_keys(request)

Deferred object fetching

• Only fetch full CourseOverview objects after access filtering
• Reduces memory usage and DB overhead

Centralized filtering and ordering

• Filters (search, active/archived, ordering) are applied once at the end
• Ensures consistent behavior and avoids repeated processing

Improved readability and maintainability

• Clear step-based flow:

1. Determine candidate keys
2. Evaluate access
3. Batch fetch
4. Apply filters

• Reduced cognitive complexity and branching

Testing Notes

• Existing tests should continue to pass without modification
• Recommended additional coverage:
  • Mixed AuthZ + legacy access scenarios
  • Staff vs non-staff behavior
  • Empty access cases

Deadline

Verawood

Other information

Resolves: openedx/openedx-authz#190

[openedx-webhooks]

Thanks for the pull request, @dwong2708!

This repository is currently maintained by @openedx/wg-maintenance-openedx-platform.

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

If you haven't already, check this list to see if your contribution needs to go through the product review process.

• If it does, you'll need to submit a product proposal for your contribution, and have it reviewed by the Product Working Group.
  • This process (including the steps you'll need to take) is documented here.
• If it doesn't, simply proceed with the next step.

🔘 Provide context

To help your reviewers and other members of the community understand the purpose and larger context of your changes, feel free to add as much of the following information to the PR description as you can:

• Dependencies

  This PR must be merged before / after / at the same time as ...

• Blockers

  This PR is waiting for OEP-1234 to be accepted.

• Timeline information

  This PR must be merged by XX date because ...

• Partner information

  This is for a course on edx.org.

• Supporting documentation
• Relevant Open edX discussion forum threads

🔘 Get a green build

If one or more checks are failing, continue working on your changes until this is no longer the case and your build turns green.

Details

---

Where can I find more information?

If you'd like to get more details on all aspects of the review process for open source pull requests (OSPRs), check out the following resources:

• Overview of Review Process for Community Contributions
• Pull Request Status Guide
• Making changes to your pull request

When can I expect my changes to be merged?

Our goal is to get community contributions seen and reviewed as efficiently as possible.

However, the amount of time that it takes to review and merge a PR can vary significantly based on factors such as:

• The size and impact of the changes that it introduces
• The need for product review
• Maintenance status of the parent repository

💡 As a result it may take up to several weeks or months to complete a review and merge your PR.

[rodmgwgu]

It's looking good so far, just some comments

[rodmgwgu]

We will need to update this once openedx/openedx-authz#225 is merged to support org level scopes (OrgGlobData).

Please create a Github issue for this if it's not already there.

[rodmgwgu]

Isn't GlobalStaff().has_user(user) already checking for user.is_superuser?

[rodmgwgu]

I see that get_in_process_course_actions is validating internally with user_has_course_permission,

But if we already know it's a staff user, do we need to do that?

Or are we using get_in_process_course_actions elsewhere and don't want to break something?