Imagine an online shop who sells... anything, really. Users place orders buying products they want. But sometimes they regret their decision me 2min after buying something. Sometimes there's a problem with the payment gateway. Sometimes you have a problem in your warehouse and the products are out of stock. Sometimes you can't sell because you can't ship to the user's address or any other constraint that can't be verified at checkout time (please please PLEASE verify everything you can at checkout time, everyone gets happy :)).
All these possibilities result in the order cancellation. Behind the scene the application updates the order's status field from processing to cancelled and hopefully logs the date/time. That's it. Right? RIGHT?
Sometimes knowing What changed is not enough. It's essential to know Why it changed.
If you don't know why something happened you are losing insight about your application, making you unable to act upon it.
Example 1: User doesn't have sufficient funds
Payment declined because the user doesn't have sufficient funds. The application cancels the order automatically.
The fields gateway and reason could be set by your application's payment workflow and error_code returned by the gateway processor.
{
"event": "order_cancelled",
"id": 42,
"actor_id": null,
"metadata": {
"reason": "payment_declined",
"error_code": "INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS",
"gateway": "IPayU"
...
}
}
Although in this example actor_id is null, I usually have an application user that is assigned to every automated action in the application.
Example 2: Can't ship to the user's address
User changed their shipping address after placing the order and for whatever reason you can't ship there.
Here reason and description were informed by an employee after manually analyzing the problem.
{
"event": "order_cancelled",
"id": 42,
"actor_id": 19,
"metadata": {
"reason": "shipping_address",
"description": "User changed his address, can't ship to the new one."
...
}
}
These are contrived examples. There are better ways to handle these cases than cancelling the order.
On the next post I'll show one way you can do it in Elixir using Ecto and Phoenix.
Many thanks to Allan Jorge, @gustavoaguiar and @tyurok from Elixir Brazil OffTopic @ Telegram for helping me overcome my writing block / fear of writing this first post.
Top comments (0)