Why do we need parent identities on frontend?

[madonzy]

I've noticed that we have plugin \Magento\ConfigurableProduct\Model\Plugin\ProductIdentitiesExtender::afterGetIdentities that is responsible to add parent tags for each child product. For example, that makes the product listing page much slower because we need to load the parent for each product on the page.

Why do we really need that on frontend? I tested and it PURGE cache for all child products when configurable product is saved.

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[engcom-Hotel]

Hello @madonzy,

Thanks for the reporting and collaboration!

We request you to more elaborate on the issue so that we can reproduce it. Please provide us the below information:

• Environment information
• Steps to reproduce
• Expected and Actual result
• In case a specific use case, please provide those also
• Any screencast or screenshot

Thanks

[hostep]

Quoting from @sivaschenko's remark in another thread:

child products affect parent product representation while parent products do not affect child products representation on the frontend, so in order to be sure that the cache is valid - the cache of pages with parent products should be invalidated when a child product is changed.

For example, when a child product becomes out of stock or back in stock or is being enabled/disabled, it might influence how the parent product is being displayed on the frontend.

Does that answer your question @madonzy?

[madonzy]

@hostep not really. When child products become out of stock or enabled/disabled then child product cache tags are purged, and that means the cache of the category page will be purged. There's nothing to do with parent product in your examples.

[hostep]

I think I start to see your point, trying to fetch the parent products on the frontend makes not so much sense. But the afterGetIdentities method is also being called when a product is saved in the backoffice for example, and then it starts to make sense that for both the child and parent the caches are being purged, correct?

So if there is a performance problem here, it's that these lines should not be executed on the frontend, am I understanding this correctly?

[madonzy]

@hostep yeap. I think just disabling the plugin in the frontend scope di.xml will be a clean solution.

[engcom-Hotel]

@hostep thanks for helping us in understanding the issue.

Hello @madonzy,

We have looked into the code written here and tried to reproduce the issue by the following way:

1. Have some code changes to debug the issue as follows in the file named ProductIdentitiesExtender.php in line no.: 58:

$parentsidsbychild = $this->getParentIdsByChild($subject->getId());
        foreach ($parentsidsbychild as $parentId) {
            $parentProduct = $this->productRepository->getById($parentId);
            $parentProductsIdentities[] = $parentProduct->getIdentities();
        }

2. Search for the configurable product from Frontend i.e. Chaz Kangeroo Hoodie
3. Add a breakpoint in line no. 59 to check the value for the $parentsidsbychild variable, made in step 1.
4. It has been observed that code has not reached in foreach loop because the value of $parentsidsbychild is empty.
5. Even if we have tried it for the product detail page.
6. But the method afterGetIdentities is calling every time.

In the next scenario we have tried to check the performance of the page by enabling and disabling the plugin and we have seen the below difference in them. Please have a look at the below screenshot:

With Plugin:

Without Plugin

I just need to confirm if we are on the correct path or if we can reproduce the issue in some other way.

Thanks

[madonzy]

@engcom-Hotel first of all it's totally strange that you did not get the parent product id from the child product. The second is that you measure not only the request but everything that is not needed :)

Make sure that getParentIdsByChild is returning you the value and then got to the browser and test only document request time. Go to Network -> Document -> Select main loaded document -> Timing

P.S: Also, make sure you do not use any cache like Varnish or Built-in FPC in front

[engcom-Hotel]

Thanks @madonzy for the quick response. Let me try this and get back to you. :-)

[engcom-Hotel]

Hello @madonzy,

We have tried to reproduce the issue by searching for a configurable product in the frontend like Chaz Kangeroo Hoodie-XS-Black but we are always getting the Parent product id in the frontend, not the child product id. Please have a look at the below screenshot for the reference:

Instead, If I can get the Child id i.e. 53 in this case, I think we can get the Parent id. Can you please suggest the product for which we can get the child product in the frontend?

Thanks

[hostep]

If I'm not mistaken, you need to find a simple product on the frontend which is also a child of a configurable product and that simple product needs to be marked as Visible so it shows up on the frontend.

You'd probably be better of when setting up your own product data instead of using the sample data, it's going to be easier to test I think...

[engcom-Hotel]

Hello @hostep,

I have tried this as well. But still, the issue is not reproducible for us. We have followed the below steps:

1. Create a configurable product with one configuration:
   

2. Edit the configured product and mark the visibility as catalog, search:
   

3. Cleared the cache

4. Check in the frontend, but for us, the function afterGetIdentities is only called for the parent product but not for the child product. For us the parent product id is 2049 and the child product id is 2050. Please refer to the screencast for reference:

CompressedScreenRecording2022-06-08at8.40.05.PM.mp4

Let us know in case we have missed anything.

Thanks

[hostep]

Hmm, I'm getting confused, just tried understanding the code again:

• So the if checks if a product is of type configurable or something else, in case of something else, it just returns the current $identities
• In case it's of type configurable the code continues and tries to find the parents of this configurable and then appends their identities

So uhm, I'm confused now, since when can configurable products in Magento have parents?

@madonzy: what do you make of this? Do you have a case where a configurable product has parent products somehow (is this possible with grouped or bundled products maybe, I don't think so...)?
Or how were you able to trigger this code?

[madonzy]

There's a method that is called on product listing: \Magento\Catalog\Block\Product\ListProduct::getIdentities

There is a loop you can see fetching the identities of all products and merging it. Just make sure this method is called and all product are loaded.

[hostep]

Yes, but that's expected I think, otherwise the caching system in Magento can't invalidate such pages in case one of the products displayed on them gets changed.
Also, those products get loaded anyway to be able to display them, so it shouldn't really cause performance problems.

[madonzy]

@hostep You can archive this behavior by setting all the configurable product "Visible" attribute to be "Not Visible Individually" and you set the simple product "Visible" attribute to be "Catalog, Search". Then you'll see an unneeded performance impact.

[hostep]

That's really strange, because the return in these three lines of code will trigger when it's a simple product. So this should not cause performance problems.

The code further in the method will only trigger when a configurable product is being loaded on the frontend and will try to load parents of the configurable product, which makes not much sense to me.

Have you already debugged this piece of a code a bit yourself? Does the code make sense why and how it triggers in your specific case?

[madonzy]

@hostep first of all, that is a new version, there's no such if in 2.3.6 for example https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/2.3.6/app/code/Magento/ConfigurableProduct/Model/Plugin/ProductIdentitiesExtender.php

Also, I do not really understand the sense of that if statement... If the product is configurable then it will never have a parent product,(method getParentIdsByChild will always return an empty array) so what is the purpose of that plugin?

[hostep]

Ah this is the first time you mention your Magento version (please next time do this in the opening post, it will make issue handling faster 😉 )

Indeed, the code in 2.3.6 is very different, it was changed significantly in #30746 (which got included in Magento 2.4.2 and higher)

As to why the plugin still exists, I have no idea, either it can be thrown away, or a bug was introduced in #30746, it's hard to say.

@engcom-Echo or @viktorpetryk: do you guys remember something about that Pull Request?

[engcom-Hotel]

Hello @madonzy,

It seems the issue has been fixed in the latest development branch i.e. 2.4-develop. Shall we close this issue?

Thanks

[madonzy]

@engcom-Hotel shell we remove that plugin at so?

[hostep]

There's a discussion about this going on in Slack:

So it's being looked into I hope 🙂

[engcom-Hotel]

Hello @madonzy,

We are confirming this issue as per the below comments:

#35546 (comment)
#35546 (comment)

We can remove this plugin from here as it is not in use.

Thanks

[github-jira-sync-bot]

✅ Jira issue https://jira.corp.adobe.com/browse/AC-6469 is successfully created for this GitHub issue.

[m2-assistant]

✅ Confirmed by @engcom-Hotel. Thank you for verifying the issue.
Issue Available: @engcom-Hotel, You will be automatically unassigned. Contributors/Maintainers can claim this issue to continue. To reclaim and continue work, reassign the ticket to yourself.

[aholovan]

It's likely the same funny code in "add_bundle_parent_identities" plugin

[hostep]

#36529 got merged yesterday, it changes some logic in the ProductIdentitiesExtender::afterGetIdentities method. I haven't tried to understand it yet, because it's quite complicated, but maybe it resolves this issue here @madonzy ?