Practicing writing tasks

In our own internal education, we've found that the following exercises work particularly well. They're all in sequence – the task to create for each subsequent exercise modifies the code you wrote previously.

Working on getting better at task-writing? See Writing a high-quality task.

Assignments

• 1. Auto-tag customers with @gmail.com email addresses, with "gmail"

  • Configure the task's event subscriptions appropriately

  • Support case-insensitivity – recognize "@gmail.com", and "@Gmail.com"

  • Ignore domains with more extensions – don't tag for "@gmail.com.au"

  • Make sure that any existing tags on the customer's account are kept, not lost

  • Use the REST API for this operation

  • Use a static preview action, to show the merchant a preview of what the task will do

• 2. Move to a dynamic preview action, using stub data

• 3. Remove the stub data, and add two event preview definitions: one for a @gmail.com address, and one for another address

• 4. Allow the merchant to configure the domain name to look for, and the tag to apply

  • Help the merchant make sure they enter a real domain name – return an error if the domain doesn't include a "."

  • Support case-insensitivity – if the merchant enters "Gmail.com", and the customer's email address ends with "@GMAIL.COM", they should still be tagged

• 5. Allow the merchant to add any number of domain name and customer tag pairings

• 6. Support responding to customer updates, in which the customer's email address changes

  • Remove any domain name tags that do not apply, and add the tag (if any that does apply

  • Do not remove any tags that contain a domain name tag – if the tag "google" should be removed, do not accidentally remove "google-foo"

  • Make this optional – allow the merchant to choose whether or not Mechanic listens for this

• 7. Move to GraphQL for removing and adding tags

• 8. Allow waiting a configurable number of minutes

  • Account for the customer tags or email address having changed during the waiting period

• 9. Create a backfill mode for processing all existing customers, that the merchant can run manually

  • Use {% for customer in shop.customers %} for this operation

  • Note: this technique is useful for reconciling missing events

• 10. Move to GraphQL for scanning customers

  • See Querying Shopify to learn about looping through results using cursors

• 11. Move to GraphQL bulk operations for scanning customers