Extend Spartacus NGRX Store with additional data - spartacus-storefront

For our Spartacus project, we need to introduce additional Data properties in the checkout:
We have the case, that the user needs to select a delivery mode per product.
In an ideal world, upon selection, the selected delivery mode would be saved in the NGRX Store and also in the Backend to stay within the principle of the data binding defined here: https://sap.github.io/spartacus-docs/connecting-to-other-systems/#component-data-binding
Expected Data / User flow:
User goes to Checkout and to Delivery Mode Step
Custom OCC Call is made to load the supported delivery modes for each product (depends on product type and further customer specific logic)
The cart items are displayed, enhanced with a dropdown containing the available delivery modes
The user selects a delivery mode
The selected delivery mode is stored on the cart entry within the NGRX Store and saved in the backend
The new Cart totals is calculated based on the costs of the selected delivery mode
The new Cart totals is stored on the cart within the NGRX Store and saved in the backend
The user clicks on continue to get to the Review Order Step
The cart items are listed with the previously selected delivery mode
After some analysis of the existing code, we found a property deliveryMode on the orderEntry. This does not seem to be used anywhere in spartacus, but could be used to make Step 9 work by following this stackoverflow answer and this one.
Questions regarding this flow:
How can we extend the NGRX Store? We assume, it would be possible to just extend the facade (Active Cart Service), bypass the store and save the information in the backend (Described here) and afterwards refresh the store from the backend. Is that Assumption correct? If yes, that feels awkward though, as we need to reload the whole store just to contain the new property deliveryMode on the orderEntry
How can we hook into the price calculation of the cart totals to update the total based on the selected delivery mode? And again, how can we bring the new total sum into the store?
There seem to be several Answers within the Slack Channel without very few usable answers around extending the ngrx store, even though for us, it seems to be a quit normal task.. :-/
Any thoughts, inputs or support would be very appreciated. :-)

This seems like a difficult thing to accomplish seeing as delivery modes per product aren't supported as-is in spartacus. But some ideas:
You can extend core CartEntry classes (adapter, connecter, facade, etc.) to include the delivery mode for entries added to the cart. You will probably need to change all to include the delivery mode setting(s). All of these are exposed so you can modify them as needed including the store.
Utilizing multiple carts to have a product per cart and set delivery mode that way. But this would be cumbersome in my opinion.
As far as price calculation goes, I'm assuming OCC calls return total prices. Does the call for the cart entries include delivery mode costs per entry?

We have implemented the following work around and it works so far:
Enhance the Cart Model in the backend
Add new Endpoints to load the available delivery Modes per Product (by bypassing the NGRX Store)
Add new Endpoints to save the selected Delivery Mode (by bypassing the NGRX Store)
After Save Endpoint, a cart Reload is triggered, which loads the new cart totals having a custom property on the order entry (via type augmentation) into the store from the backend

It's already a lot of years past since Spartacus project started, but looks like it's still really raw projects. Spartacus is not ready to deal with real word customer's requirement and complexity of customize it quickly grow at real project(so you start to think do we really need it, as it's so unflexible at some dimentions). Some parts is really hard or not possible to customize, so you begin to search a workarounds(This question is one common case).
I think NGRX Store is one of the biggest pain in the ass to customize something at Spartacus. 2 years past and nothing changed by Spartacus team...

Related

Shopify - Validate cart items at checkout?

A product in my store (e.g. a fine art print) has a base price of £20 and it has multiple customizable options (size / framing) that are added as additional items to the cart (e.g. Small [£0] / Medium [+£10] / Large [+£20] or Unframed [£0] / Framed [+£10] )
I have to do it this way because some products have more than 3 variant options (Shopify only supports 3)
These additional items that represent the customization options for the base product are added when the customer adds the base product to cart, but the additional products representing options are hidden to the customer in the cart.
At checkout however all is revealed, the base product appears with 2 additional items along with their additional prices. Not ideal but OK!
However, it occurred to me that there's nothing stopping a tech-savvy nerd from grabbing the variant ID of the additional items and sending a POST request to /cart/update.js that removes them from the order during checkout.
The customer just reloads the checkout page and they've just halved the price they have to pay!
I need to prevent this from happening.
I don't suppose there's a way to validate all the items in the cart when the customer requests the checkout page?
If that's not possible, how do other Shopify stores get around this issue?
If you are on the Shopify Plus plan there are two things you can do:
During checkout validation - use Script Editor to check the cart contents and if it's invalid, set the base product quantity and additional products to 0. This will prevent customers from checking out.
Post checkout validation - use Shopify Flow to cancel the order after it's placed and if it's invalid
But that's a lot of development, especially when you are not familiar with it, it will be hard to go through and make it work as expected (covering all edge cases). It's possible to create a such script but analysis of all possible scenarios and writing a code for it will take some time. If I were you I would consider an app that creates bundles as a single item. Adding such a bundle to the cart takes a few seconds to process as the app is making some admin API calls in the background but it solves your problem. I cannot promote any paid solution on StackOverflow but you will easily find something - there are plenty of solutions in the app store.
The decision comes down to your estimation + possible change requests and fixes vs. the cost of the app on a yearly basis

How do I access Shopify data without advanced account?

All I'm wanting to do is track sales of certain products from a certain date. My company is wanting to add a banner to track sales goals for raising money for charities. So basically, we'd tag a few products as being part of that goal, set a goal, and then need to update the goal progress by a certain amount every time a sale is made on one of those products. As far as I can tell, without access to Shopify's analytics API, this is not possible. How can I do this?
What you want to build is perfectly possible. However, you need to generate Private App Credentials, so you can use Shopify API. It doesn't matter if you have an account by yourself, someone else can follow these steps and send you the credentials your way.
If you don't actually need to modify anything through the API, you could have them set a webhook (Settings -> Notifications -> Webhook) on Order Creation (or similar) that posts to your server and you can check what product got sold and see if it has got the tag.
The "easy" way to do this is to create an app that receives order webhooks and can check on tagged products and keep a sum of target items sold.
Then the app should have use a script tag to insert a simple script with the current value into the web page at a configured place by css selector
OR the app could update one or more snippet files that you could include until the promo is done.
I'd tend to go with the script tag option since that's a bit more flexible and you should be able to change your theme when the promo is over to report results without having to touch the app again.

How can I implement modifiable products (which are subscriptions) in Shopify?

I've implemented subscriptions through ReCharge where users can select products and these are saved as line item properties for that product. This was the only solution I could think of with my limited time using Shopify.
Per this question, it seems like line item properties are read-only after checkout. If this is truly the case, is there any solution that enables having modifiable subscriptions where users can re-select products for that subscription product that I can implement?
I'm using Shipstation for the shipping piece if this matters at all.
How can I implement modifiable products (which are subscriptions) in Shopify?
You can't. Well, technically you can but it is not easily done. Since you indicated that you're looking for official answers, I've contacted Shopify via email for you and I've been discussed this with Brad Leclerc, where he said:
That is indeed the case with line item properties being read-only after checkout, so it would need to be reconstructed for the new order. There's no super quick/easy to do that without some custom development to automate the process. If you end up wanting to do that, I'm sure a developer from http://experts.shopify.com could set something like that up.
You have two choices, either hire someone from experts.shopify.com to help or build your own marketing script from scratch.
Proof of email: http://i.imgur.com/OeM5gSm.png
I'd do this with meta fields on the customer.
meta fields can be used on the subscription product template to make it sensitive to the state of the customer's subscription (new or existing)
Use a order web hook to detect when a new subscription product has been purchased and then update the customer meta fields (e.g. subscription level and start and end dates).
use a periodic task in your supporting private app to:
prompt user before subscription becomes due to update their payment details or cancel the subscription
create and bill new orders for each subscription period
I am not familiar with Shopify, nor Revcharge, but according to the references, couldn't you simply customize the product page in shopify?
https://docs.shopify.com/manual/configuration/store-customization/page-specific/product-page/get-customization-information-for-products
According RevCharge, you should use a Shopify product template anyway..
http://recharge.helpscoutdocs.com/article/91-recharge-integration-guide

Bigcommerce - request products based on a list of IDs

I am using the Bigcommerce API to develop a small standalone application for a client. I store product information in a local database anytime I fetch products from Bigcommerce, to reduce latency and network load. However, products can change on Bigcommerce, and while it is acceptable for my application to show mildly outdated information, I will need to update my local cache at some point. My current plan is to do this by storing the original date I requested the product, after which I will need to perform another request to refresh the cache.
My question is, given a list of products (including their Bigcommerce IDs), is there a way to request updates to all of them through a single call to the Products Resource? I can make a request for each individual product by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products/{id}
I can also request all products within an unbroken ID range by calling:
GET {api}/v2/products?min_id={value}&max_id={value}
I am able to successfully call both of the above methods, and I can chain them together in loops to fetch all products. What I want to do is request multiple products with unrelated IDs in a single call. So, something like this:
//THIS IS NOT A REAL METHOD!
GET {api}/v2/products?id[]={value1}&id[]={value2}
Is there any way I can do this? Or is there another approach to solving this that I haven't considered? My main requirements are:
Minimal API requests. My application is small but my client's bigcommerce store is not, and I will be processing tens of thousands of products. I have limited CPU and network resources available, and I simply cannot process that many requests.
Scalable. As I said, my client's store is large, and growing. I need a solution whose overhead scales at a manageable rate with number of products.
Note: my application is a small web application written in PHP running on a Linux shared hosting environment. It is a back of house system which will likely only be used by single user at a time, during standard business hours. I haven't tagged the question with PHP because my question is about the API, which is language agnostic.
One approch can be.
First get all products from BigCommerce using simple products call.
Set some interval time to get updated product list.
You can use min_date_modified and max_date_modified OR min_date_created and max_date_created in products API call to get updated products details.

POST Order with values for configurable product fields?

I've successfully got 3rd party merchant orders posting new orders to my client's BigCommerce store programmatically. I've even got product options posting as part of the order (product->option set-> option relationships are a total cluster).
My client relies heavily on configurable fields. I'm able to pull the definitions of the configurable fields for each product, but can't find a way to POST or update the configurable field values through the API.
Is it possible to manipulate an order's configurable fields through the API?
Got a response from the support team # BigCommerce. Manipulating configurable fields via the API is not currently possible and not currently on the roadmap.
Original reply below:
Unfortunately that is a product limitation with the API, it will not tie to configurable fields on the product. The best you can do is attach that information through a generic text field like 'staff_notes'. Honestly I have not heard of any talk of adding a way to add products with configurable fields to orders via the API. I think this may be because anything that can be done with configurable fields can be done with options and options are what is being pushed for the future. I have noted this feedback down though and will pass it along to our Product Manager for the API. Best case scenario is that it may be seen in a future version of the API which is at least several months away.