BUG: Webhooks should return updated fields

[Jason27]

I would assume that most apps, if not all apps, only need to know what has CHANGED on an item (item/update webhook). Right now, all items that enter the queue must be totally reprocessed because we don't know what has changed, BUT If we knew which field had been modified, and it didn't fall under the app's scope, we could just throw it out of the queue rather than wasting 5+ separate api calls on it trying to figure out what had actually changed and whether it needs to be reprocessed.

Why can't there be an array of updated_fields included that we can use to quickly throw away items that don't concern us? It would save a TON of api calls!

[jordanholmes]

Hello,

That is not really a bug but more a design choice by Shopify.

Surely you can just compare the data from the webhook to the data you have locally to see what has changed and then discard if it's not relevant. Not sure why you would need to make 5 (or any) api calls for this.

[Jason27]

Why even waste a single extra call that isn't necessary! It's a buggy design choice and it should have been addressed years ago. Some merchants send 200,000 webhooks per day - probably because of inventory. I don't want to spend any compute on these webhooks. Oh this is an inventory update, trash it!

[Jason27]

And to take it one step further - You can get so many webhooks from a single merchant, that if you app does require 5 or more api calls to complete the processing of a single item (Yes it is very possible if you are reading and saving metafields as well), it is mathematically impossible to process all the products in queue due to the Rate limits. It is literally impossible to process all the items sent by the update webhooks... how is this not a bug?

[ShopifyDevSup]

Hi @Jason27 👋

Although we don't support sending only the updated fields, you are welcome to select just the fields that are within your app's scope by specifying the `WebhookSubscriptionInput.includeFields` and `WebhookSubscriptionInput.metafieldNamespaces` parameters in the `webhookSubscriptionCreate` mutation. Webhook best practices are to implement periodic reconciliation jobs, and bulk operations intended to handle large volumes of data by design. 

Hope that helps!

[Jason27]

Sorry but this canned response does not address the issue I described whatsoever. I hope you at least take the time to write down the idea and pass it to the right dev team for real analysis.

[ShopifyDevSup · Accepted solution]

Absolutely! I'll be sure to let our product team know how valuable you would find this feature.

[Jason27]

Thank you! It would surely have a substantial impact on reducing the total load on your API servers.