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Developer Concepts: CommonOrder

In Reaction, the Cart and Order schemas are similar but with several key differences. But there are often calculations for taxes, shipping, and such that need to happen for both types of entities, and it can be overly complex to write such calculation functions in a way that takes into account all of the differences between carts and orders.

To solve this problem, we introduced a third entity type, the CommonOrder, as well as transformations that can convert carts and orders to one or more CommonOrders.

The best way to fully understand what a CommonOrder looks like is to examine its schema. But here's a brief summary:

• Carts and Orders can contain multiple fulfillment groups and items from multiple shops, but a CommonOrder is limited to just a single fulfillment for a single shop. Roughly speaking, each fulfillment group on a cart or order is converted to one CommonOrder.
• Carts have a single list of items while Orders have an item list per fulfillment group. Since a CommonOrder represents just one fulfillment group, it has just one list of items.
• A CommonOrder has a limited subset of fields, focusing on order properties that are useful for calculations.
• A CommonOrder may have billingAddress, shippingAddress, or originAddress properties, if each is known.
• CommonOrder.sourceType is set to either "cart" or "order", allowing you to check what entity was converted into the CommonOrder when it truly matters. The CommonOrder has cartId and/or orderId properties on it, providing a link back to the source entities. (orderId will be null when created from a cart and cartId may be null when created from an order, if the order was not placed from a cart.)