Working with Shopify webhooks 

Shopify webhooks within model actions 

Shopify webhooks within model actions in Gadget ensure your application is kept up to date with the latest Shopify store data.

When an event occurs in your Shopify store, such as the creation, update, or deletion of a product, Shopify sends a webhook to your Gadget application. This webhook contains information about the event that just occurred.

In Gadget, each Shopify model has corresponding actions (create, update, delete) that are triggered by these webhooks. For instance, if Shopify sends a products/create webhook, Gadget will run the create action on the Product model in your app. This action uses the incoming parameters from the webhook to create a new record in your Gadget database.

To handle these webhooks:

1. Gadget verifies the authenticity of the webhook to ensure it's coming from Shopify.
2. It then triggers the corresponding action associated with the webhook event.
3. The complete payload of the webhook is accessible within the trigger object passed to your action code, allowing you to use the data within your action's logic.
4. If an action fails, Gadget will retry it up to 10 times with increasing delays between attempts. If the action fails on the last attempt, the webhook is considered "lost", though Gadget will later attempt to automatically reconcile the missing webhook with Shopify.

Reconciliation of webhooks 

As described in the above process, in the case when a webhook fails or is missed, Gadget automatically catches the missed webhook during a daily reconciliation and re-runs the corresponding action.

Effectively, this means that your data will always go back in sync with Shopify, even after an outage, because of the automated reconciliation that is built into our webhook processing.

Shopify webhooks within global actions 

Shopify webhooks can trigger global actions if a Shopify connection has already been set up on a Gadget app. To run a global action when a webhook is received, add the Shopify data trigger to your global action, and configure which webhook topics to listen to. Gadget will register the webhook topics, and trigger the global action when Shopify sends webhook payloads.

Shopify data triggers on global actions are similar to Shopify data triggers on model actions, however, there is no nightly reconciliation for global action webhook triggers. If a webhook is missed, its payload will not be retrieved at a later time and the action will not be run.

Only webhook topics granted by the access scopes selected in a Shopify connection will be available as global action triggers. You can select multiple webhook topics to dispatch to the same global action as well.

If one or more webhooks have been disabled for a particular shop, those webhooks will also no longer trigger any global actions.

Adding a Shopify webhook trigger to a global action 

To add a Shopify data trigger to a global action:

1. Select your global action in api/actions
2. Click + in the TRIGGERS panel and select Shopify
3. Select one or more webhook topics

The webhook payload can be found in the trigger object provided by the action context parameter.

example product/update global action
JavaScript
Copy
1export async function run({ trigger, logger }) {
2  // access product payload attributes at trigger.payload.id
3  // access the topic at trigger.topic
4  logger.info(
5    {
6      productID: trigger.payload.id,
7      title: trigger.payload.title,
8      topic: trigger.topic,
9    },
10    "product update webhook happened"
11  );
12}
13
14export const options = {
15  triggers: {
16    shopify: {
17      webhooks: ["products/update"],
18    },
19  },
20};

When to use webhook triggers within global actions 

It's best to use webhook triggers on global actions when you want to run code that doesn't affect the state of your application or database. This is because there is no reconciliation for these triggers, so data integrity and consistency can't be guaranteed.

Below are some examples where you might use webhook triggers within global actions.

Use cases 

• Real-time notifications and alerts: You can use webhooks to send notifications to your team or customers. For example, you might send a Slack message to your fulfillment team when a new order is created, or notify a customer via SMS or email when their order status changes.
• Forward data to an external service: You can forward a webhook payload to an existing service, for example pushing Shopify order data to an ERP. Depending on the type of data being forwarded, you may want the resiliency built into model action webhooks for this use case.

Disable webhook processing per shop 

Gadget supports limiting which webhooks are processed by certain shops to reduce webhook volume. Certain Shopify shops generate a ton of webhooks. Processing and storing these webhooks can add up to cost too much, especially if you aren't making use you don't want to pay to process and consume webhooks for all models for all shops that have installed your app. For example, within your Shopify app, you may want to disable certain webhooks from processing on Shopify models for free trial users so you do not end up adding up your costs for users on your free trial.

Within Gadget, you can disable certain webhooks from processing so you have greater control over your app. Every shopifyShop model has a disabledWebhooks field which is a boolean value set to false by default. When the value is changed to true this will disable webhooks within the scheduled sync from syncing data concerning the model associated with the disabledWebhooks value changing.

For example, let's take a look below at our update action with our shopifyShop model where within the run function we'll set our disabledWebhooks field to true when it's a shopifyProduct model. What we've defined here is any reconciliation sync going forward on webhook re-registrations will disable webhook processing and won't sync data for the shopifyProduct model. If we also head to our shopifyShop data we'll notice within the registeredWebhooks column that the shopifyProduct is no longer associated with its value.

JavaScript
Copy
1/**
2 * @param { UpdateShopifyShopActionContext } context
3 */
4export async function run({ params, record, logger, api, connections }) {
5  applyParams(params, record);
6
7  record.disabledWebhooks = { shopifyProduct: true };
8  // Disabling all webhooks that sync data for the shopifyProduct model
9
10  await preventCrossShopDataAccess(params, record);
11  await save(record);
12}
13
14/**
15 * @param { UpdateShopifyShopActionContext } context
16 */
17export async function onSuccess({ params, record, logger, api, connections }) {
18  // Your logic goes here
19}
20
21/** @type { ActionOptions } */
22export const options = {
23  actionType: "update",
24};

Handling deletion webhooks 

Any deletion webhooks will call the delete Action on the model, along with running the delete Action for all Shopify records associated with that model. For example, when a product is deleted, we delete all of its options, images, and variants. All other webhooks will call either the create or update Action, based on whether or not the record currently exists in Gadget.

Registering Shopify webhooks 

In some cases, you may need to manually register webhooks to ensure your Shopify app receives the necessary events from a store.

You should only have to manually register webhooks on development environments. Gadget automatically updates webhook registrations during deployment, so you should not need to manually register webhooks for a production environment. If the selected access scopes have changed and are deployed to production, stores that have installed your app will need to re-authenticate to grant your app access to the new scopes, and webhook registration will be done at that time.

Here are the scenarios when you should manually register Shopify webhooks in development environments:

1. When editing connections: If you edit a connection to include new models, you may need to register new webhooks for those models. For example, if you add the Collection model, you should register webhooks to receive collections/create, collections/update, and collections/delete. If you edit the connection to include additional access scopes, you will have to re-authenticate your app on your development store to grant the app access to the new scopes, and new webhooks will be automatically registered.

2. When missing webhooks: If you notice that certain webhooks are not registered, as indicated on the Installs page of your Shopify connection, you should manually register the missing webhooks. This can happen if you are missing access scopes or topics/namespaces for your registered webhooks.

3. API version upgrade: Shopify releases a new API version every 3 months, and when you upgrade your Shopify Connection's API version, you should ensure that your webhooks are still correctly registered for the new version.

4. When accessing protected customer data: If you are using an Event subscriptions version later than 2022-07, you will need to request access permissions in the Protected customer data access section on the API access page of your Shopify Partners app. After completing the required sections, return to your Gadget app and register the webhooks.

How to register Shopify webhooks 

To register Shopify webhooks, you can:

1. Navigate to the Installs page for your Connection in Gadget (Settings -> Plugins -> Shopify)
2. Click the ⋮ button for any stores you have re-authenticated, and select the Register Webhooks option:

Shopify webhook status 

The status and timeline of a Shopify webhook can be observed within the Queues dashboard in Gadget. Here you'll be able to view all Shopify webhooks running and observe the progress in how they're running.