Solidus Bactracs

This gem integrates Bactracs with Solidus. It enables your Solidus system to push shipment RMAs to the system.

Currently this requires Solidus ~ 4.x

This integration was cloned from spree_shipstation to provide some consistency with other Solidus<-->Shipping related patterns.

Add solidus_bactracs to your Gemfile:

gem 'solidus_bactracs', github: 'suvie-eng/solidus_bactracs'

Bundle your dependencies and run the installation generator:

bin/rails generate solidus_bactracs:install

The installer will create a configuration initializer that you'll need to customize.

The installer will also create a migration, which is required by the API integration. If you are going to use the XML integration, feel free to delete the migration file, as those columns won't be used by the extension.

This extension can integrate with Bactracs via SOAP-based XML API integration. The gem currently makes SOAP 1.1 format calls, though the API support SOAP 1.2

The XML integration works by exposing a route in your Solidus application that generates an XML feed of all recently created and updated shipments in your Solidus store.

⛔️ This section is outdated and inaccurate.

In order to enable the XML integration, make sure to configure the relevant section of the configuration initializer, and configure your Bactracs/Andlor site accordingly:

• Username: the username defined in your configuration.
• Password: the password defined in your configuration.
• URL to custom page: https://yourdomain.com/bactracs.xml.

You can also configure your Bactracs/Andlor site to pull the XML feed automatically on a recurring basis, or manually by clicking the "Refresh stores" button.

There are five shipment states for an order (= shipment) in Bactracs. These states do not necessarily align with Solidus, but you can configure Bactracs to create a mapping for your specific needs. Here's the recommended mapping:

There's nothing you need to do. Once properly configured, the integration just works!

There are a few gotchas you need to be aware of:

• If you change the shipping method of an order in Bactracs, the change will not be reflected in Solidus and the tracking link might not work properly.
• When bactracs_capture_at_notification is enabled, any errors during payment capture will prevent the update of the shipment's tracking number.

The API integration works by calling the Bactracs API to sync all of your shipments continuously.

Because Bactracs has very low rate limits (i.e., 40 reqs/minute at the time of writing), the API integration does not send an API request for every single shipment update, as you would expect from a traditional API integration.

Instead, a background job runs on a recurring basis and batches together all the shipments that need to be created or updated in ShipStation. These shipments are then sent one at a time to Bactracs RMA creation endpoint.

This allows us to work around Bactracs's rate limit and sync up to 4000 shipments/minute.

As you may imagine, this technique also comes at the expense of some additional complexity in the implementation, but the extension abstracts it all away for you.

In order to enable the API integration, make sure to configure the relevant section of the configuration initializer. At the very least, the integration needs to know your API credentials and store ID, but there are additional options you can configure — just look at the initializer!

This gem exposes a config var that holds an evaluator for the type of RMA being sent through bactracs. E.G. 1, 2, W, etc.

config.evaluate_rma_type = proc do |shipment|
 "W"
end

You should overwrite this with your own means of determining the RMA type for a given shipment.

Andlor uses the key "DFPart" to enable the indication of which item was 'defective' and being returned. This only applies to Type 4 RMAs.

Currently, the DF Part is the number on the shipment, and there is not yet an override method.

Once you've configured the integration, you will also need to enqueue the ScheduleShipmentSyncsJob on a recurring basis, to kick off the synchronization process. Because every app uses a different background processing library, this is left up to the user.

Here's what an example with sidekiq-scheduler might look like:

# config/sidekiq.yml
:schedule:
  schedule_shipment_syncs:
    every: ['1m', first_in: '0s']
    class: 'SolidusBactracs::Api::ScheduleShipmentSyncsJob'

This will schedule the job to run every minute. This is generally a good starting point, but feel free to adjust it as needed.

One of the main issues to be aware of is that the Bactracs API always responds with an HTTP 200, even if the request failed. This may be a SOAP convention, or just the idiosyncrasies of the API design.

⚠️ You must always inspect the Message component of the response in order to determine success/fail. THe e.g. Result field can say "true" but the Message states a failure.

There other factor you need to be aware of when integrating via the API: the interval between your syncs is, on average, larger than your latency in processing background jobs, or you are going to experience sync overlaps.

As an example, if it takes your Sidekiq process 10 seconds to execute a job from the time it's scheduled, but you schedule a shipment sync every 5 seconds, your sync jobs will start overlapping, making your latency even worse.

This is a problem that is faced by all recurring jobs. The solution is two-fold:

1. Monitor the latency of your background processing queues. Seriously, do it.
2. Make sure your sync interval is not too aggressive: unless you really need to, there's no point in syncing your shipments more often than once a minute.

Because of the object abstractions in this gem, some find it difficult to test API responses vis the console. To ease such console work, a 'console harness' was developed that provides several affordances to exploratory development.

Create a new harness in the console via

h = SolidusBactracs::ConsoleHarness.new

The easiest way to test the API, seeing both the output of the shipment when serialized as a XML SOAP request, and the result from the Bactracs API.

h.try_one

or try a few

h.try_batch(4)

maybe you have a shipment with particular issues, e.g. shipment number H123456789

h.shipment_number('H123456789')

h.try_one(h.shipment_number('H123456789'))

.shipment_number retries that shipment from the scope of available h.shipments.

If that was successful, you may find your list of shipments has one or more shipments that are already synced

h.shipments.size # => 7
h.refresh
h.shipments.size # => 6

You can set where in the recordset you want to continue trying from

h.cursor = 5
h.try_one

You can also change the default batch size

h.batch = 10
h.try_batch
# output from 10 runs, if not errors occur

Several deeply-nested objects are exposed for convenience

• runner
• syncer
• sync (job)

h.serialize(shipment)
# see the output of serialization

h.runner.authenticated_call(shipment: h.shipments[0], serializer: h.syncer.client.shipment_serializer)

Remember that you can monkey patch code in the console, to test the improvement the harness or the gem itself.

⛔️ This section is outdated and inaccurate.

First bundle your dependencies, then run bin/rake. bin/rake will default to building the dummy app if it does not exist, then it will run specs. The dummy app can be regenerated by using bin/rake extension:test_app.

bin/rake

To run Rubocop static code analysis run

bundle exec rubocop

When testing your application's integration with this extension you may use its factories. Simply add this require statement to your spec/spec_helper.rb:

require 'solidus_bactracs/testing_support/factories'

Or, if you are using FactoryBot.definition_file_paths, you can load Solidus core factories along with this extension's factories using this statement:

SolidusDevSupport::TestingSupport::Factories.load_for(SolidusBactracs::Engine)

⛔️ This section is outdated and inaccurate.

To run this extension in a sandboxed Solidus application, you can run bin/sandbox. The path for the sandbox app is ./sandbox and bin/rails will forward any Rails commands to sandbox/bin/rails.

Here's an example:

$ bin/rails server
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 6.0.2.1 application starting in development
* Listening on tcp://127.0.0.1:3000
Use Ctrl-C to stop

Before and after releases the changelog should be updated to reflect the up-to-date status of the project:

bin/rake changelog
git add CHANGELOG.md
git commit -m "Update the changelog"

Please refer to the dedicated page on Solidus wiki.

Copyright (c) 2022 Suvie, released under the New BSD License.