Simple TODOs - List 1

Major weaknesses in the module should be handled first:

1- Very heavy server load on product stock sync.
The current mechanism is :

• Magento cron job (10min) checks all products available on its DB.
• Check if they were synced to CheckoutApp(CA) before. If not, it is skipped.
• The confirmed products IDs are used in a SQL query to get all these products current stock in CA.
• Magento spends sometimes over 30sec (the maximum allowed time for the cron job to work) to loop over all the confirmed products to update their stock quantity.

Actually, cron job does not only do this stock sync, some other Magento’s built in functionalities are triggered too, along with any other orders sync in this module....well, cron job is busy.

Solution:

• Use the CA “lastmodified” timestamp value “stock” table ALTER introduced in previous post “Starting Over” to compare the changes done since last sync time.
• Create an API that handles the stock update in case stock quantities changes have been detected.

2- Proper error handling
Catching exceptions in code breaks cronjob (So they were removed). But in manual sync exceptions are caught fine.

3- Proper Tax Sync
Only simple tax rates are implemented currently. No tax groups or locations are implemented in to the sync.

4- Proper Product and Customer info (metavalue and metanumber) Update
Currently, if a certain detail is found different during sync, it is updated. CA actually handles this in a different way. CA inserts the detail as a new record. So when querying a product to show, it queries the last updated detail version.
This issue for customers causes problems. When an order is synced for a certain customer, then later this customer has some details updated, the previous orders will reflect the newest detail and not the detail at the order creation time.

5- Automatic Metatype
Metatype values play the role of mapping the metavalue and metatypes correctly. These values are required in the extension configuration. For convenience, the values input in Magento’s configuration should be done automatically after reading CA’s Metatype table.