fix: Overwrite allowances in special exams instead of creating a new …

[brianjbuck-wgu]

Addresses item 1 of this issue: openedx/frontend-app-instructor-dashboard#194

The edx-proctoring model has a unique constraint on (user, proctored_exam, key) where key is the allowance type. The current implementation of the v2 endpoints respects that unique constraint. However, the v1 Instructor Dashboard only allows a learner to have a single allowance at a time regardless of the type. To match that behavior, this PR does an upsert that only allows a single allowance per learner overwriting a previous allowance if it exists even if its of a different key (type).

[openedx-webhooks]

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR updates the Instructor API v2 special-exams allowance endpoints so that granting a new allowance overwrites any existing allowance for the same user+exam (rather than allowing multiple allowance types to accumulate), addressing item 1 in openedx/frontend-app-instructor-dashboard#194.

Changes:

• Add a helper to “add or replace” an allowance by removing existing allowances with different keys for the same user+exam.
• Update single-exam and bulk allowance POST endpoints to use the new replacement behavior and to surface user lookup failures.
• Add tests asserting that granting/bulk-granting an allowance with a different key replaces the previous one.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

File	Description
lms/djangoapps/instructor/views/api_v2.py	Introduces allowance replacement helper and wires it into allowance grant/bulk-grant endpoints.
lms/djangoapps/instructor/tests/views/test_special_exams_api_v2.py	Adds regression tests validating “replace different key” behavior for single and bulk grants.

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[wgu-taylor-payne]

Can you provide more context in the PR description itself?

[brianjbuck-wgu]

@wgu-taylor-payne, I updated the PR description. Hopefully that makes more sense and gives a bit more context.

[wgu-taylor-payne]

Looks good, thanks!