WCF Service call to multiple rows. How to architecture it? - wcf

Let's say I have a scenario where I have a Service that is responsible for retrieving the price of a single product given the ID and another Service that gives me the current stock position of it.
It's okay when I'm looking only at one product, but what about a list page where I have 60 products? What should I do in this case? Call the service product by product to retrieve it's current price and stock position?
I think this would be extremely slow and cost a lot of resources. But what could I do to make it look good and at the same time have performance?
Currently we have these information in the database in a column next to the product. These price and stock columns are updated by a sql service that updates it when is necessary so when I need to grab the value for a lot of products at the same time I just need to select two columns more. It's really fast, but right now we have some more systems in need of this information and I would like to transform all these stuff in a service.
Thanks a lot!

Well, you could always have multiple service methods:
the one you already have, to retrieve a single product, and the price for a single product
create a new service method which would take a list of product ID's, and return a list of product objects - or a new DTO (data-transfer object) that holds product and price
This way, you could keep your current users happy, and also do something to make batch requests work more efficiently.

Can your service method take an array of IDs? And return an array of values? That way if you want one record your array only has 1 item, if you want more, you just populate the array with multiple values?

Related

Is there an API call to list all available product id's (ID's alone) in Shopify?

I use POSTMAN GUI for retrieving a list of items from Shopify API.
I would like to know if there exists a way to get available product id's alone, preferably as a list of values over a single api GET call. The one I know of is
/admin/api/2022-04/products.json
It returns a list of all product information, and looping over them/traversing the json is not very efficient. I hope there must be an easy way to fetch all ID's alone in one go. Should there be not?
You can add /admin/api/2022-04/products.json?fields=id to the end of your request to limit the output only for a single field or multiply.
Please note that if you have more than 250 products you will need to make more than one request, since the request is limited to 250 products.
You can make one call to the Admin API for all your product IDs using the Bulk Query. That will result in you receiving a URL where you download a file in JSONL format with every single product ID in your store, without the paging or limits of other approaches.

DDD - Entity vs ValueObject

I was reading about DDD and I realize that sometimes an entity might be a VO or VO might be an entity. You can know which one is better depends on the context. I was checking different examples. For example, shopping cart DDD example. Product is an aggregate root, Cart is an aggregate root and items is a entity of Cart, so if you want to add a product to the cart you would do something like this:
$cart->addProduct(id $id, $name, $price)
class Cart
{
private items;
function addProduct(ProductId $id, ProductName $name, ProductPrice $price) {
this->items[] = new Item(
new ItemProductId($id->ToString()),
new ItemName($name->ToString()),
new ItemPrice($price->ToString()),
new ItemCartId(this->id->ToString())
);
}
}
There are two reasons why I think it is a VO:
You cannot modify the value's item ( only if the product's
price has been modify there is a event that would modify its price).
The item doesn't have id, it's has a reference of the
product(ItemProductId) and a reference of the cart (ItemCartId)
I was reading about DDD and I realize that sometimes an entity might be a VO or VO might be an entity. You can know which one is better depends on the context.
Usually its pretty clear whats entity and whats an value object. If it contains data that's fixed at the time of assignation, its a value object. For example "order address" on the order aggregate. When the order is placed, the address is set. "Addresses" may be an entity in user aggregate (i.e. a list of his common addresses), but for an order its an value object since its not supposed to change when the user edits or deletes one of his addresses.
cart->addProduct(id $id, $name, $price)
class Cart
{
private items;
function addProduct(ProductId $id, ProductName $name, ProductPrice $price) {
this->items[] = new Item(
new ItemProductId($id->ToString()),
new ItemName($name->ToString()),
new ItemPrice($price->ToString()),
new ItemCartId(this->id->ToString())
);
}
}
That's a pretty bad example. Why would or should the value object be ItemPrice? Does that makes it any special? Why string? A price is usually just a numeric value but also involves a currency, passing it as string kinda beats that.
On top of that, having ItemCartId in the it does
a) leak data persistence knowledge into your domain. The fact, it's contained inside this->items[] already establishes a relationship between the entity (or aggregate) and the value object. ItemCartId as no meaning in the domain, other than that it's required for relational database engines (=persistence knowledge)
There are two reasons why I think it is a VO:
You cannot modify the value's item ( only if the product's price has been modify there is a event that would modify its price).
You sure? Why would a eCommerce business want to have the prices in the card anyways?
Prices are informational only, they could change before the order is placed. Same as availability.
A lot of users put stuff in their cart and check on next day. In that time, the price could change.
No company would want to sell a product for the price when it was put into the shopping cart, if the price increased in the time since it was put in there. That would mean a financial loss.
Prices in the shopping carts are informational, not compulsory. You need know the exact process of the company.
The item doesn't have id, it's has a reference of the product(ItemProductId) and a reference of the cart (ItemCartId)
Again. Why do you think ItemCartId belongs to the Item object? That's leaked persistence knowledge, since its only important for relational database systems.
All you really need in a shopping cart is
* product or article number (not necessary the id, that's typically db knowledge)
* quantity
Nothing else. If you may want to change the user when the price changed and show the old and new price, the take the price (=currency value object, not ItemPrice) to it too as a value to compare to an old state.
Finally and probably most importantly: Consider if the shopping cart is an aggregate at all (or does fit into ddd).
After all, most shopping carts are only a value bag w/o a lot of business logic into it. The real logic (checking the real price, product availability, asking for shipping location, calculation of taxes and shipping costs) happens during the checkout process, not while putting stuff into the cart.
For example you can check out eShops on Containers demo project showing an example shopping service based on microservices and ddd.
Some microservices apply DDD (such as Ordering microservice), where others don't (Catalog microservice or the Basket (cart) Microservice).
Applying DDD doesn't mean everything needs to be done with DDD. If its simple crud based services, then you don't need DDD for these. DDD adds a value where you have complex systems and complex business logic.
A catalog has neither, it just presents data which come from a different system (i.e. ERP which on other side may be built on using DDD).
I don't understand what are you asking exactly, but the code you are providing could be improved.
First of all I suggest you to read the red book by Vaughn Vernon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Implementing-Domain-Driven-Design-Vaughn-Vernon/dp/0321834577: you can find 3 chapters describing how to define entities, value objects and aggregates, with some rules of thumbs.
One of those advices, is to keep your aggregates as small as possible, in order to improve your performance and keep the code easy to read and maintain. Imagine that you have a Blog aggregate that contains a list of Post entities: if you manage all of them in a single aggregate, when you want to modify the blog Author, for example, you are forced to retrieve all of the blog's post, without any reason, and that means that you are doing a join and slowing down your application. The more your aggregates grows, the slower those queries with their joins.
So, in the case of the Cart, I suggest you to build the cart without any item or product, instead you can add the CartId to the Item. Cart does not know which items it contains, but items know in which cart they are.
About value objects: is a tool that allows you to wrap some validation and business logic inside a class that is represented by its state and not by its id (like entities), so in the case of the cart, if you put two identical bottles of water inside it, how can you know that they are different? Do you need to know that they are different? Are they different if they are physically (or logically different) or are they different if some of their attribute is different?
In my opinion an item or a product, in your case, are entities because they are not measuring anything, and when you put an item twice, you actually have two different items (and you use an id to recognize them).
This is not necessary like this, sometime you can use a value object and sometimes an entity, it depends on your context. A good example to understand that difference is with money:
if you want to measure an amount, for example 10 dollars, probably a value object will work for you, because you don't care if it a bill or another, you just want to measure 10 dollars; in this case if you have 10 dollars, is not important if you have a bill or another, the important thing is that is 10 and not 5
in the case that you need to recognize different physical bills, for any reason (you need to track money for the police), you should use an entity, because any printed bill has a unique serial number, and a 10 dollar bill, in this context, is actually different from another 10 dollar bill
Hope this can help you.
Goodbye!

How to get distinct xp values?

Each product has two xp parameters - productLine, productType.
Under productLine, there are multiple product types.
I need to fetch list of distinct productType under each productLine.
There is limit on listing all products due to pagination.
Is it possible with ordercloud?
The short answer is there's no shortcut way to do this. Typically in these scenarios it works the other way - you have a pre-defined list of possible values and restrict what goes in via a dropdown list in the UI, or an enum in the integration layer, or something along those lines. For your scenario, you would need to resort to fetching all products (page by page) and keeping track of those unique values. Ideally that one be a one-time thing and going forward I'd suggest validating/restricting the input, although I don't know your exact requirements.

SQL Point of sale how does a return work

Im new to POS systems. I have to create a very simple one for a few stores. Here is my SQL Server DB Schema:
The question that I have is how to handle returns.
In the real world how does a return works? Is a return a new sale but with a negative balance? If so then I would need to add to my sale table a "transactiontype" field (sale, return, etc.) and also a "referencesaleuid" field so the new sale (that will be a return) can reference the original sale ticket.
How to handle returns is a business decision.
For one example, we have worked with retailers of larger ticket items that needed to match returned products back to the original line item. So if a customer walked out of the store with two widgets and later returned one widget then we needed to be able to link the returned SKU back to the original transaction and SKU.
As another example, we have worked with retailers of smaller ticket items where returns were treated negative transactions.
I would suggest consulting closely with the business managers to find out what they would like to do in order to manage the business best.

How to keep a list of 'used' data per user

I'm currently working on a project in MongoDB where I want to get a random sampling of new products from the DB. But my problem is not MongoDB specific, I think it's a general database question.
The scenario:
Let's say we have a collection (or table) of products. And we also have a collection (or table) of users. Every time a user logs in, they are presented with 10 products. These products are selected randomly from the collection/table. Easy enough, but the catch is that every time the user logs in, they must be presented with 10 products that they have NEVER SEEN BEFORE. The two obvious ways that I can think of solving this problem are:
Every user begins with their own private list of all products. Each time they get one of these products, the product is removed from their private list. The result is that the next time products are chosen from this previously trimmed list, it already contains only new items.
Every user has a private list of previously viewed products. When a user logs in, they select 10 random products from the master list, compare the id of each against their list of previously viewed products, and if the item appears on the previously viewed list, the application throws this one away selects a new one, and iterates until there are 10 new items, which it then adds to the previously viewed list for next time.
The problem with #1 is it seems like a tremendous waste. You would basically be duplicating the list data for n number of users. Also removing/adding new items to the system would be a nightmare since it would have to iterate through all users. #2 seems preferable, but it too has issues. You could end up making a lot of extra and unnecessary calls to the DB in order to guarantee 10 new products. As a user goes through more and more products, there are less new ones to choose from, so the chances of having to throw one away and get new one from the DB greatly increases.
Is there an alternative solution? My first and primary concern is performance. I will give up disk space in order to optimize performance.
Those 2 ways are a complete waste of both primary and secondary memory.
You want to show 2 never before seen products, but is this a real must?
If you have a lot of products 10 random ones have a high chance of being unique.
3 . You could list 10 random products, even though not as easy as in MySQL, still less complicated than 1 and 2.
If you don't care how random the sequence of id's is you could do this:
Create a single randomized table of just product id's and a sequential integer surrogate key column. Start each customer at a random point in the list on first login and cycle through the list ordered by that key. If you reach the end, start again from the top.
The customer record would contain a single value for the last product they saw (the surrogate from the randomized list, not the actual id). You'd then pull the next ten on login and do a single update to the customer. It wouldn't really be random, of course. But this kind of table-seed strategy is how a lot of simpler pseudo-random number generators work.
The only problem I see is if your product list grows more quickly than your users log in. Then they'd never see the portions of the list which appear before wherever they started. Even so, with a large list of products and very active users this should scale much better than storing everything they've seen. So if it doesn't matter that products appear in a set psuedo-random sequence, this might be a good fit for you.
Edit:
If you stored the first record they started with as well, you could still generate the list of all things seen. It would be everything between that value and last viewed.
How about doing this: crate a collection prodUser where you will have just the id of the product and the list of customersID, (who have seen these products) .
{
prodID : 1,
userID : []
}
when a customer logs in you find the 10 prodID which has not been assigned to that user
db.prodUser.find({
userID : {
$nin : [yourUser]
}
})
(For some reason $not is not working :-(. I do not have time to figure out why. If you will - plz let me know.). After showing the person his products - you can update his prodUser collection. To mitigate mongos inability to find random elements - you can insert elements randomly and just find first 10.
Everything should work really fast.