Mechanic
đŸ“Ŗ Shopify REST Deprecation
  • â›Šī¸Introduction
  • 🤓Hire a Mechanic developer
  • đŸ’¯status.mechanic.dev
  • đŸ“ŖShopify is deprecating the REST API
  • 🙋"I need something custom!"
  • 🧑‍đŸ’ģ"I need help with my custom task!"
  • 🤖"I need help with my AI-written task!"
  • Resources
    • âŦ‡ī¸Install Mechanic
    • 🧑‍đŸ’ģTask library
      • Contributing
      • Requesting
    • 🚀Slack community
    • 🤝Partner directory
    • 🧠Tutorials
      • Video walkthroughs
        • Auto-tag orders by originating staff member
        • Maintain a tag for orders processed today
        • Auto-tag orders with their tracking numbers
        • Sync inventory for shared SKUs
        • Auto-tag products when their SKU(s) change
        • Auto-publish new products
        • Email a report of customers who haven't ordered in X days
        • Upgrading a Mechanic task: Adding a time delay
        • Email the customer when tracking numbers are added to their order
        • Adding an optional time delay to your Mechanic task
        • Delete all orders
        • Send an email when a specific product is shipped
        • Send recurring reminders about unpaid orders
        • Send an email when a product's price goes below its cost
        • Auto-tag customers by sales channel
        • Creating products in bulk
      • Creating a Mechanic webhook
      • Practicing writing tasks
      • Triggering tasks from a contact form
      • Creating scheduled CSV feeds
      • Fetching data from a shared Google sheet
    • 🏆Converting tasks from Shopify REST to GraphQL
      • Conversion: Single resource lookups
      • Conversion: Resource loops to paginated queries
      • Conversion: Connections from a resource
      • Conversion: Metafield lookups from a resource
      • Conversion: Resource lookups in task option fields
  • Core Concepts
    • Events
      • Topics
      • Parent and child events
    • Tasks
      • Subscriptions
      • Code
        • Environment variables
        • Action objects
        • Error objects
        • Log objects
      • Options
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      • Previews
        • Defining preview events
        • Stub data
      • Shopify API version
      • Advanced settings
        • Documentation
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        • Perform action runs in sequence
      • Import and export
      • User Form
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      • Google Sheets
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      • Shopify
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        • Base64
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        • URL
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    • Runs
      • Scheduling
      • Concurrency
      • Ordering
      • Retries
    • Interacting with Shopify
      • Responding to events
        • Reconciling missing events
      • Reading data
        • âš ī¸Liquid objects
        • 🏆GraphQL in Liquid
        • Bulk operations
        • The Shopify action
      • Writing data
      • Shopify admin action links
      • API rate limit
      • API versions
  • Platform
    • 🔆Policies
      • Data
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    • Cache
      • Cache endpoints
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      • Receiving email
      • Custom email addresses
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    • Error handling
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      • Event topics
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    • GraphQL
      • Basics
        • Shopify Admin API GraphiQL explorer
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      • Bulk operations
    • Integrations
      • Appstle Subscriptions
      • Google Drive and Google Sheets
      • Judge.me
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    • Liquid
      • Basics
        • Syntax
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          • Condition
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      • Liquid console
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        • Deprecated filters
      • Mechanic keyword literals
        • array
        • hash
        • newline
      • Mechanic objects
        • Action object
        • Cache object
        • Event object
        • Options object
        • Task object
        • âš ī¸Shopify REST Admin API
          • đŸšĢArticle object
          • đŸšĢBlog object
          • đŸšĢCollection object
          • đŸšĢCustomer object
          • đŸšĢDiscount code object
          • đŸšĢDispute object
          • đŸšĢDraft order object
          • đŸšĢFulfillment object
          • đŸšĢFulfillment order object
          • đŸšĢFulfillment event object
          • đŸšĢGift card object
          • đŸšĢInventory item object
          • đŸšĢInventory level object
          • đŸšĢLine item object
          • đŸšĢLocation object
          • đŸšĢMetafields
            • Metafield object
            • Metafield representation object
            • Metafield collection object
          • đŸšĢOrder object
          • đŸšĢOrder risk object
          • đŸšĢPrice rule object
          • đŸšĢProduct object
          • đŸšĢProduct image object
          • đŸšĢRefund object
          • đŸšĢShipping zone object
          • đŸšĢShop object
          • đŸšĢTheme object
          • đŸšĢTheme asset object
          • đŸšĢTransaction object
          • đŸšĢVariant object
      • Mechanic tags
        • liquid
        • action
        • assign
        • error
        • log
      • Mechanic code snippets
    • Shopify
      • Custom authentication
      • "Read all orders"
    • Webhooks
  • Techniques
    • Preventing action loops
    • Writing a high-quality task
    • Tagging Shopify resources
    • Debouncing events
    • Responding to action results
    • Working with external APIs
      • JSON Web Signatures
      • AWS request signatures
    • Finding a resource ID
    • Migrating templates from Shopify to Mechanic
    • Securing Mechanic webhooks
    • Monitoring Mechanic
  • FAQ
    • The app isn't loading. What do I do?
    • How do I stop a large batch of runs?
    • A Shopify event is missing. Where is it?
    • Does Mechanic have an affiliate program?
    • Can non-owners install Mechanic?
    • Can I replace Shopify's order emails with Mechanic?
    • Can I manually set Shopify permissions for Mechanic?
    • Does my theme need to be updated for Mechanic?
    • Do you have a plan for development stores?
    • Why don't I see any events in my task's activity?
    • Can I read data back from my webhook submission?
    • My task added a tag, but now the tag is missing – why?
    • How do I add an unsubscribe link to my emails?
    • How do I send images with my emails?
    • Can I re-send order confirmation emails with Mechanic?
    • Why am I seeing a different price than on the app store?
    • Do you have a Partner-friendly plan?
    • Why are my tasks delayed or not running?
    • My task is failing because of a permissions problem. Why?
    • How do I preview email attachments?
    • Can I query external APIs?
    • Why can't I access the Shopify API during preview mode?
    • How do marketing preferences work with Mechanic?
    • Can I send data to Google Sheets?
    • What's possible with timeline comments?
    • I'm getting a "query param length is too long" error when using GraphQL.
    • Can my Mechanic concurrency limit be raised?
    • What IP address does Mechanic use?
    • Can Mechanic read or manage customer subscriptions?
    • Why is everything harder now?
    • Can task content be translated into multiple languages?
    • Can I add a time delay to my task?
    • Can I add another store to my existing Mechanic subscription?
    • How can I reduce memory usage of my task?
    • How do I connect PayPal to Shopify with Mechanic?
    • How do I add a Shopify access scope to my task?
    • Can I have my Mechanic data retained for more (or less) than 15 days?
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Important Updates

  • đŸ“Ŗ Shopify REST Deprecation
On this page
  • Configuration
  • Properties
  • Example
  • Versioning

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  1. Core Concepts
  2. Tasks
  3. Previews

Defining preview events

PreviousPreviewsNextStub data

Last updated 1 year ago

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During , Mechanic scans the task's . For each found, Mechanic constructs a synthetic preview event, resembling one that the task might encounter during live use.

By default, each preview event's data is sampled from previous events that the Mechanic account has seen, for the same topic.

However, developers may define their own preview events, containing whatever data the developer wishes to use for preview. This may be useful for several reasons:

  • Most tasks conditionally respond to events based on their data. Controlling the event data present during preview allows the developer to deterministically verify the results of the action.

  • Further, by deterministically/predictably generating actions, the developer can consistently demonstrate the permissions they need to Mechanic. (To learn more about this, see .)

  • Defining preview event data is usually simpler than defining .

    • Stubbing the event variable (or any of the ) removes any intelligence from the objects Mechanic generates from event data, a drawback avoided by defining a preview event and its data. Using the as an example, a task may typically access its custom attributes via order.note_attributes.color, or via order.note_attributes[0].value. This dynamic behavior is lost if the event variable is stubbed out, which can result in behaviors that are difficult to diagnose.

  • Multiple preview events may be defined per event topic. This allows developers to verify that their task renders the appropriate results under a variety of circumstances.

    • Defined preview events can be labeled with a description, which is visible in the task preview pane. This makes it easy to identify the scenario that a preview event is meant to represent.

Preview event definitions cannot provide for return values from Shopify query operations (i.e. output from the , or the result of traversing Shopify Liquid objects, as in customer.orders.first). For those purposes, use the technique.

Configuration

Preview events may be defined using the "Edit preview events" button, in the task preview pane.

The configuration area for preview events contains a quickstart link for each event topic the task subscribes to, allowing developers to get started using sample data if the event topic is known to Mechanic. Or, the developer may start with a blank preview event definition, filling in whatever topic and data are useful.

A developer may define any number of preview events per topic. If no preview events are defined for a given topic, Mechanic will construct its own ad-hoc event during preview.

Properties

Description

Displayed beneath the event topic in the preview pane, allowing the developer to distinguish one scenario from another.

Topic

Identifies the event definition to Mechanic, when Mechanic goes to construct preview events by topic.

Data

Used to construct event.data, and may be set to whatever values are useful in representing a specific scenario. The data structures used here should resemble what Mechanic will receive for a live event of the same topic.

Notably, the data here can be limited to just the properties that are useful. For example, while Mechanic might normally generate a complete payload for shopify/orders/create, the developer might only care about the "email" property of the order – and so their defined preview event data might be limited to just that property. (Note that the inverse may not be true: defining preview event data for traversals into other objects, e.g. using preview event data to define a value for order.line_items[0].product.title, will not work.)

Example

For a trivial task, subscribing to shopify/customers/create, and having the following task code...

{% if customer.email contains "gmail.com" %}
  {% log message: "got a gmail user!", email: customer.email %}
{% else %}
  {% log message: "got someone else!", email: customer.email %}
{% endif %}

... we define two preview events, one which represents a Gmail user, and one which does not. This allows us to easily assert that the task behaves properly in both scenarios.

Versioning

Preview event definitions are stored along with the task itself, and thus are present in the tasks version history (and, naturally, in task exports).

Because definitions are a part of the task itself, they're appropriate for use as a testing tool, allowing the developer to verify that a task behaves as intended at every stage of the task's development.

task preview
subscriptions
event topic
Previews
stub data
Order object
stub data
shopify filter
subject variables