Improve dummy data generation

[aldesantis]

This is related to #138.

It is currently almost impossible to display a subscription's total in a reliable way. The current implementation (SolidusSubscriptions::SubscriptionLineItem#dummy_line_item) has several flaws:

• It still assumes there's only one line item per subscription, not allowing you to compute the total of an entire subscription.
• When the line item is tied to an order, it uses the persisted order as the dummy order, with the risk of presenting stale information to the user.
• When the line item is NOT tied to an order (e.g. because it was added manually by an admin or the customer after the subscription was created), it persists a new order to the DB on every call. This is performance-intensive and pollutes order data.

The biggest architectural problem is that there is no way to reliably compute an order's total if that order is not persisted in the DB. Spree::OrderUpdater not only relies on a lot of information being persisted, but also persists the order after calculating the totals, so it wouldn't work with an ephemeral/frozen order.

The solutions I currently see are:

1. For each subscription, persist a dummy order to the DB that has the sole purpose of computing the subscription's totals. This has the advantage of computing totals in an extremely reliable way, since we'd use the same APIs Solidus uses during the checkout flow, but the order would have to be updated every time the subscription's details or content change. Furthermore, we'd be polluting the spree_orders table with fake data (although this can probably be mitigated with a custom column and a default scope that causes Spree::Order to ignore it).
2. Attempt to mimick the calculations performed by Spree::OrderUpdater. I'm not 100% sure this is possible without persisting certain data (e.g. shipments) to the DB, and we'd have to constantly keep our own calculations up-to-date with any changes in the core.
3. Attempt to use Spree::OrderUpdater with a SolidusSubscriptions::Subscription object instead of a Spree::Order object. We'd have to mock a lot of functionality, but it's potentially doable.
4. Submit a PR to the core to make order computations more modular. The problem here is that we'd have to wait for the PR to be merged and a new Solidus version to be released before anyone can take advantage of the functionality.

Whatever solution we go with, we should completely disregard the original order that generated a subscription: it's not a reliable source of information about the subscription and all the data we need is already stored on the subscription itself.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It might be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[blocknotes]

Hey @aldesantis, I saw this recent commit. But we are still interested in this feature, right?

From my standpoint, the approach n. 3 could be good in this case in order to avoid the creation of DB entities entirely if possible.

[aldesantis]

@blocknotes that's right, we're still interested in doing this, but we want to do it right. 😛

As far as the approach goes, I also think number 3 is the most promising. Let me know if you need anything and good luck!

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It might be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[kennyadsl]

Closed by https://github.com/solidusio/solidus_subscriptions/pull/172