Images Revert on Products Routinely and Disappear

[osseonews]

Just thought I'd post this constant bug with images in the hope that someone else experienced this, b/c even if this happens all the time with our products, I can't get Swell to actually address this extremely serious bug in the platform. So maybe if someone else actually has seen this, it will be acknowledged and a fix deployed.

The bug is simple: Out of nowhere the images for products simply revert to an earlier version of the images and we lose newer prior images. Initially, when this started to happen, I thought I was going nuts and maybe we forgot to actually upload new images. But after this happens every single week for months, you realize it's not you, but there is a serious bug. Didn't we upload new images for this product a few weeks ago and weren't they on the product ? Why are the images no longer there? Why are the images now the same images from months ago before the last update? What happened to the new images which we saved?

The only solution to this problem is to upload all the images again to the product and resave the product and pray that they don't disappear again in a few weeks. Needless this to say having to reupload images to the same product every few weeks is not fun, and it hurts sales. It's impossible to go thru every product every day to ensure that the images have not mysteriously been deleted.

Of course, when we report this problem, we are asked to replicate it. But, how can we replicate it when our images randomly disappear from the product and revert to older images? How do we know when this will happen or why? Are we supposed to take screenshots of when we upload new images to prove that we did it correctly and then show how all the images disappear randomly?

IMHO, there seems to be some cache employed for the image data and product data in a store and this cache is entirely corrupted. The bug might be related to a similar bug which asks to resave a product, even if we didn't make any changes whatsoever to the product. But, I honestly don't know. All I know is that the product image data on Swell randomly disappears and it has nothing to do with anything we do, as we are so scared to touch anything in the dashboard anymore for fear of some random change.

The only solution seems to be to move all our product data to a stable CMS, which is a major pain, as part of the appeal of Swell is having a good product CMS. Luckily, we have been backing up images, so we can recover the lost images on Swell for the time being. but, it would be nice to not have to worry every single day that the images we uploaded for products that help to sell our product don't randomly disappear.

[ericingram]

I checked with the team and we haven't had anyone else report this issue, which suggests it could be caused by something on your frontend. How are you fetching products and could they be getting cached somewhere else?

Another approach could be to look at the events on a specific product where you saw this behavior and see whether the image URLs changed at all. If they did, there will be a log of the change in our system and we could track it down.

Image URLs have the MD5 hash of the contents in the URL itself, which means the URL has to change in order for the image to change.

[ericingram]

We haven't seen any cases where the API returns stale data, but even if it did, this could be avoided by not including the items.product object in the cart update. I can't say where it's coming from but it's definitely there in the logs and it has old image data in it.

There isn't a place in the API where product data is normally duplicated either, meaning carts/orders don't normally cache product data.

[osseonews]

Hmmm. I don't know. We will fix the tax calculation, but I don't see how that effects anything, as it is just duplicating whatever is in the cart and updating the taxes, and I'm pretty sure the product data is not even there, as you need expand the data to get product data in a cart call. We could not possibly update the product images otherwise, and we don't use expand in that api call. We don't put images anywhere or update the cart anywhere else, so I don't see how that is in the logs. Maybe your cart to orders function, example below, is doing something under the hood that is copying the items.product, b/c we certainly don't do that anywhere else.

const order = (await this.client.post('/orders', {
        cart_id: cartId,
      })) as SwellOrder

[osseonews]

In any case, the dashboard routinely asks us if we want to save new data on a product, even if we didn't even update/change anything. Just opening up a product page in the dashboard, seems to trigger something which causes this, even if we didn't change a thing. My suspicion is that under the hood, when some API updates a product, there is some mismatch between what the dashboard has and what the API updated, if that makes sense, and then somehow the product gets updated to an earlier state.

I have to imagine that Swell caches the data somewhere for a product along with the associated images. Or am I wrong about that? Corrupted caches is not an uncommon problem.

[ericingram]

There is a bug related to the dashboard saying a page needs to be saved when you didn't change anything, we should prioritize that soon, but there isn't any data cache in the API or dashboard currently. I mean, there is cache logic, but it's been disabled for a long time as we need to chase down some race conditions before enabling it again.