September 7, 2022 — 1.2234 Service Update

Internal Release Notes

Production Tenant Features

• Product Option Images (COM-6020): When adding a product to an order or creating a new shipment in the Order Admin UI, images for product options are now displayed. The default product image will be shown first, with clickable images of each option listed below the dropdown menu of option names. You can select a product option from either the dropdown or by clicking the option image. After confirming your selections, the option image will be displayed in the order and shipment details tabs of the Admin UI.
• Site Settings UI Rework (COM-6114): Site settings on the General Settings page have been rearranged into new tabs and sections within the existing page for better organization. 
• Canada Post Credentials (COM-6045): Canada Post credentials have been redesigned in the shipping and carrier integration service for better implementation. Additional improvements will be done in the future, but test credentials from Canada Post should now work better and experience fewer issues.

Internal Updates

The following enhancements are internal-only and not exposed to clients.

• TECH-858 and TECH-857: Improvements have been made to the Product Runtime and Site Builder caches, upgrading cores and changing the output cache to use compression.
• CHAR-4111: A location backfiller has been added to the API translation layer that publishes messages to the inventory and order routing queues for synching.
• CHAR-3962: An existing job that deletes old inventory records for specific tenants has been updated so that it can run across all tenants as well.
• CHAR-3946: Improvements have been made to the Future Available to Promise inventory feature to avoid potential race conditions. Previously, it was possible for Order Routing to suggest a future inventory record that gets released before allocation. This would cause problems as no allocation would be able to occur. Now, if there is no record for the given future date then allocations will be made against current inventory instead to avoid this issue.
• TECH-888: Overnight hours/limits are now supported on the profile rules for API rate limiting. For instance, if hours are 12 AM to 5 AM then an overnight rate limit of 2.0 can be enforced.
• CAT-1574: Additional improvements have been made to support the real-time inventory service, in which the catalog handles in stock and out of stock events that are emitted from RIS in batches. Batches reduce performance issues with high loads of inventory data.

Additionally, the following settings have been added to UIs but do not currently affect behavior. In an upcoming release, functionality will be updated to respect these settings and the enhancements will be announced in client-facing release notes.

• COM-6204: As part of improvements being made for the real-time inventory service, a new site setting has been added called Location Fulfillment Types. Select "In Store Pick Up" or "Direct Ship" to use that fulfillment type when checking inventory availability on the location filter in the Search and Category pages. If nothing is selected, these pages will reference In Store Pick Up inventory levels by default. 
• COM-6218 and CHAR-4085 (requested by Tourneau): A new option has been added to the UPS settings of location group configurations, called Use Declared Value. Implementations that need to use a declared value for UPS shipments can enable this option (which is disabled by default).

Production Sandbox Features

Client-Facing Updates

• Ship to Home Consolidation Setting (FFMT-3382 and FFMT-3366): A new site setting is now dedicated to Ship to Home Consolidation, under the Transfer Shipments section of the general settings. This toggle is disabled by default, but can be enabled to allow STH Consolidation on your site (meaning that transfer shipments can be created for STH parent shipments). Previously, this was enabled with the same settings as BOPIS. The “Always Create Transfer Shipment” setting has also been renamed to “Always Create BOPIS Transfer Shipments” to better clarify these settings. These site settings were added to the UI in a previous update but did not affect the fulfillment behavior – they have now been fully implemented and will determine the behavior of STH-C shipments.
• UPS Declared Values (FFMT-3402 and FFMT-3283, requested by Tourneau): A new option has been added to the UPS settings of location group configurations, called Use Declared Value. Implementations that need to use a declared value for UPS shipments can enable this option (which is disabled by default) and must then provide Kibo with the maximum value they want to insure. This value is currently set to $7500 and can only be changed by contacting the Kibo team. Then, the declared value will be defined as:
  • If the shipment value is less than the maximum insured value, then the shipment value will be used as the declared value.
  • If the shipment value is greater than or equal to the maximum insured value, the maximum insured value will be used as the declared value.
• 15 Day Subscription Frequency (COM-6278, CAT-1700, and CAT-1701): An additional subscription frequency option for 15 Days is now available, allowing subscribed products to be ordered every 15 days if selected.
• Site Settings UI Rework (COM-6221): As a follow-up to the site settings reorganization in the previous release, some minor corrections have been made to the capitalization of labels such as email templates and setting names.
• Get Inventory Response Update (CHAR-3977): The Get Inventory response now returns the taggedInventory list with the default tag displayed first. This means that the inventory record for the default tag (such as if STH is the default tag for the OrderType category) will always be displayed at the top of the list instead of at the end. This makes it easier to identify which inventory record is the default and select the ideal future inventory.
• Search Orders by Shipment Number (COM-5989 and COM-5883): The Advanced Filter menu of the Order Admin search bar now supports searching for orders by shipment number. This is an exact search that will return orders that contain a shipment with that exact number.
• Merchandizing Rules API Filter (CAM-318): The Get Search Merchandizing Rules API now supports filters to search the rules by their startDate or endDate. Both filters support gt (greater than), ge (greater than or equals), lt (less than), and le (less than or equals). You can apply this filter with the standard filter format, such as in /?filter=startDate gt DATE.
• Rate Limit Update (TECH-913): Some minor UI adjustments have been made to the API rate limit tables in the Dev Center. The table headers have been changed to "API Request Limits" and statuses have been changed to "Throttled" or "Ok." Additionally, the RPM/RPH line has been removed from the production tenant limits.

Internal Updates

The following enhancements are internal-only and not exposed to clients.

• VAMP-2023 and VAMP-2022: The descriptions for the locationsInStock and validPriceLists fields have been updated in the ProductSearch API schemas. This change is visible in Swagger and will be reflected in the client-facing API docs the next time those are regenerated.
• FFMT-3372: A new API (/commerce/shipments/{shipmentNumber}/futureAllocatableItems) now supports creating BOPIS shipments for Future inventory when transfers are disabled. This will create future shipments from a specified set of allocatable future items, making code paths simpler when creating future shipments. This new behavior for BOPIS without transfers will only be triggered for Pickup and Delivery shipments in which allowsFutureAllocate is true and futureDate is not set.
• COM-6227: Back-end changes have been implemented to support the upcoming ability to display images for bundled items and products with extras. The UI end of this work is expected to be completed in the next release and will be included with client-facing release notes.
• CHAR-4102: To support the real-time inventory service, PartNumber and SKU fields have been added to the Get Group Availability at Locations API call to keep compatibility with the current version of inventory.
• CAT-1638 and CAT-1593: API improvements have been made to support the migration from Product Sort Definitions and Search Merchandizing Rules, in which paging has been added to ensure that all rules are included in the migration.
• CHAR-3899: Location cache behavior has been optimized to better handle partial cache responses in Get by Tenant Site ID and Get Location IDs for Location Codes calls. If some of the desired locations are received from the cache, then only the data for missing locations will be retrieved from the database. The mechanism for saving locations has also been improved to add to existing caches rather than delete it.
• CAT-1699: A new flyaway script has been created for a tenant attribute, recomputePreComputedDynamicCategoriesOnAddToCart, to add it to databases when appropriate. This attribute was added to support Specialty Commerce by recomputing dynamic categories for variants when discounts are applied to the category.
• CHAR-4166: RIS updaters have been disabled for non-RIS tenants to ensure that it will not take down Redis for clients who aren't using the real-time inventory service.
• COM-6245, COM-6243, COM-6242, and COM-6244: Back-end API support has been added to make one-time changes to subscription shipping methods and products. When a one-time purchase product or shipping method is added to a subscription, the next continuity order will include that product or use that shipping method. When the continuity order is complete, the change will be removed and the subscription will return to its previous products and shipping method. These options are not yet available in the Subscriptions UI, and more information will be provided in the Subscriptions documentation and client-facing release notes when the UI work is complete.

Bug Fixes

The following list summarizes resolved issues for this release.