Edit

Catalogs

In Reaction, an operator creates and edits products and variants of those products, but none of this is visible on the storefront until the product is published. Publishing is a single button click for the operator, but let's look at what actually happens in the code.

1. The UI calls the publishProductsToCatalog GraphQL mutation, passing an array of product IDs.
   • Provided by the catalog plugin
   • /imports/plugins/core/catalog/server/no-meteor/mutations/publishProducts.js
   • If you need to, you can call this from elsewhere in API server code as context.mutations.publishProducts(context, productIds)
2. Publication will fail if any of the product IDs are not found in the Products collection in the database.
3. Permission is checked. You must have createProduct permission for every shop that is associated with any of the products, OR you must have createProduct permission for the primary shop.
4. If all products exist and you have proper permissions, then the products and their variants are looked up, transformed, and put into the Catalog collection.

Converting a product to a catalog product

In the Products collection, the top-level product and its sellable variants and options are each separate documents. In the Catalog collection, these are all combined into a single document, and some of the field names are different.

The combining and transforming is owned by the "Catalog" plugin and happens in /imports/plugins/core/catalog/server/no-meteor/utils/createCatalogProduct.js

Determining if a product has changes that need to be published

Not everything about a product is published to catalogs, but many properties are. When those properties are later changed by a shop operator, it can be helpful to query to find out which products have changes that need to be published. For this purpose, each top-level Products document has two hash fields on it, currentProductHash and publishedProductHash. These are object hashes of all publishable fields from the top-level product and all of its variants and options. publishedProductHash is updated only when publishing the product while currentProductHash is updated whenever any published field changes in the Products document.

If you need to show an indicator of published status for a product or find unpublished documents, simply compare currentProductHash to publishedProductHash. If they are not exactly equal, then there are changes since the product was last published.

Querying the catalog

To query for the catalog from a storefront UI, call the catalogItems GraphQL query. This returns only catalog items and products where isVisible is true and isDeleted is not true.

You can also call the catalogItemProduct GraphQL query to get a single catalog item if you know the product slug or ID.