Refactor after-publish cart updates for speed

[aldeed]

Resolves #5098
Impact: minor
Type: performance

Changes

After-cart-update performance improvements

There were several "afterCartUpdate" and "afterCartCreate" listeners in various plugins that were essentially transforming the cart but doing it without any coordination was chaotic and slow. Now there is instead a single cart transform function in the Cart plugin, which always runs before every cart insert or update. Plugins now register custom transforms for this using a pattern like this in registerPlugin:

    cart: {
      transforms: [
        {
          name: "setTaxesOnCart",
          fn: setTaxesOnCart,
          priority: 30
        }
      ]
    },

The main cart plugin transform then runs these custom ones in priority order. This is a bit faster, uses less memory, and resulted in consolidated and cleaner code in the Cart plugin.

After-publish performance improvements

The cart plugin has a afterPublishProductToCatalog listener that updates cart item properties from catalog variant properties and, if any have changed, saves the cart. We found that this could be very slow and crash with a Mongo connection error when there are thousands of carts that contain the changed variant.

Now the cart lookups and updates are batched so that memory usage and speed are optimal. This combined with the improved cart transformation flow described above appear to be ~10x speed improvement when publishing to catalog, based on local tests with 8,000 carts.

Other

• While testing I noticed that Reaction Admin now allows setting tax info for variant options, but when publishing, only the parent variant tax info was copied. Now it copies the option info with fallback to parent variant for backwards compatibility.
• getSurcharges was calling extendCommonOrder even when there were no surcharges defined. Now it exits early if there are no surcharges, which makes publishing and cart updates faster on shops that don't use surcharges.
• Much better logging for the post-publish and cart update flows

Breaking changes

None

Testing

Test publishing price and/or tax code changes to a variant or option that is in one or more carts. It should work and be faster than before.

You could also test this with a variant that is in 5-10k carts to verify it no longer crashes (but I've tested this thoroughly).

Almost all code related to carts has been moved around, though is mostly unchanged. The best way to test this is with something like the following smoke test flow in the example storefront:

1. add first item to cart when not logged in
2. add additional item to cart when not logged in
3. log in / register
4. log out
5. add same item and different item to anonymous cart
6. log in
7. verify all items are merged in account cart and duplicate item qty has been increased
8. remove an item from cart
9. change qty of an item in cart
10. check out the cart

[focusaurus]

Some minor nits but overall looks good. Looks like a lot of work sorting this out so thanks for that!

[manueldelreal]

[zenweasel]

Just one item I think needs to be changed, and a couple of questions/comments that could be deferred to another ticket

[zenweasel]

Yay, for use of Logger.trace

[zenweasel]

I think we should be adding/setting a flag here for when the cart has been modified so that the UX could display some sort of message.

[aldeed]

I'd need some more information about what you mean. For price changes, that was the idea behind why we have a priceWhenAdded field on there that doesn’t ever change. The thought was that the client can compare price with priceWhenAdded and show a “price has increased/decreased” or whatever messaging they want.

If there are other automatic changes clients would care about, we could do something similar.

Made changes