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Re: Store Activity Section - Webhooks notice

Store Activity Section - Webhooks notice

Jason27
Shopify Partner
113 3 44

Hi, can you guys please remove the WEBHOOKS notices from the Store Activity section?

 

Users are thinking theres some issue with my app. It's quite frustrating.

 

 

Replies 3 (3)

KarlOffenberger
Shopify Partner
1873 184 903

Those event messages (audit log if we may call it that) are quite useful I'd say. It would only ever show up there when your app creates these webhook notifications i.e. most likely upon installation, and that's it. You could use on-boarding and present users with some information to re-assure them what will happen and that such store activity logs are absolutely normal.

Jason27
Shopify Partner
113 3 44

Hi Karl, thanks for the feedback - I was mainly addressing the Support team in this matter.

 

I would argue the opposite. Merchants do not even know what a webhook is. When they install an app they agree to allow certain parts of their store to be monitored. No need for more info than that.

 

Also, my apps turn webhooks on and off, ALOT - otherwise how do you prevent getting another webhook response when you just updated a product? For every product update, I have to deal with another webhook response coming into my system. When the numbers are massive, you're talking about millions of useless responses daily that my system has to reprocess and say 'oh yeah we just did this' and of course in codeworld its never that simple (not to mention the extra processing power to deal with it).

 

KarlOffenberger
Shopify Partner
1873 184 903

Also, my apps turn webhooks on and off, ALOT - otherwise how do you prevent getting another webhook response when you just updated a product? For every product update, I have to deal with another webhook response coming into my system.


And there you have it. That is the real underlying issue. Not the fact that the activity log displays... activity logs... as it should, but that your app is spamming the activity log by unsubscribing from and subscribing to webhook events as a means of avoiding self-recursive updates. And yes, users should feel uneasy if their activity log goes bananas - that's one of the points of having one!

 

Yes, your app will have to deal with the 'oh yeah we just did this' whether you choose to check for updated_at (very fragile approach) or sleep your webhook handler for a bit and for a particular product ID (a tad less fragile, can work but scales like a ****) or actually maintain an ephemeral state correlating webhook events to requests dispatched from the handler to match the follow up event (your terminal case).

 

So we may agree to disagree if need be 😉