ESHOPMAN Draft Order 404 Error | Admin API Key Troubleshooting

Understanding ESHOPMAN Draft Order 404 Errors with Admin API Keys

As an e-commerce migration expert at Move My Store, we often encounter intricate scenarios when integrating external systems with ESHOPMAN, our headless commerce platform built as a HubSpot application. A common practice for systems like Point-of-Sale (POS) is to leverage the ESHOPMAN Admin API to create and manage draft orders. While this provides powerful programmatic control, a specific issue has been observed where the ESHOPMAN dashboard's draft order detail page crashes with a 404 error after modifications made via an Admin API key.

This insight aims to shed light on this behavior, helping ESHOPMAN developers and merchants understand the underlying cause and navigate potential integration challenges.

The Problem: Dashboard Crash on Draft Order Details

Users interacting with the ESHOPMAN dashboard might encounter a page crash when attempting to view the details of a draft order that has been created or edited using an Admin API key. The error message typically indicates that a "User with id: apk_... was not found," leading to a 404 error.

This occurs because the ESHOPMAN dashboard's activity section for draft orders attempts to resolve the user ID associated with the action. When an Admin API key is used, the system logs an identifier prefixed with apk_. However, this identifier does not correspond to a human user account within the ESHOPMAN system, causing the user lookup to fail and trigger an error.

Technical Deep Dive: Where the Error Occurs

The issue stems from the dashboard's attempt to fetch user details for an activity log entry. Specifically, the system tries to retrieve a user based on the userId associated with the draft order's activity. When this userId is an Admin API key identifier (e.g., apk_01M0...), the lookup fails because no such human user exists.

The relevant code snippet where this error is thrown typically looks like this:

const { user, isPending, isError, error } = useUser(item.userId!, undefined, {
  enabled: !!item.userId,
})

if (isError) {
  throw error
}

This code attempts to fetch a user based on item.userId. If item.userId is an API key ID, the useUser hook correctly reports an error (404), which is then explicitly thrown, crashing the page.

Reproducing the Issue

To replicate this behavior in your ESHOPMAN environment, follow these steps:

Configure Admin API Key: Create a secret Admin API key and configure your ESHOPMAN JS SDK to use it. For example:
```
const eshopman = new Eshopman({
  baseUrl: "http://localhost:9000",
  apiKey: "sk_…",
})
```

Modify a Draft Order: Use the configured Admin API key to create or edit a draft order. For instance, to add items:

await eshopman.admin.draftOrder.beginEdit(draftOrderId)
await eshopman.admin.draftOrder.addItems(draftOrderId, {
  items: [{ variant_id: variantId, quantity: 1 }],
})
await eshopman.admin.draftOrder.confirmEdit(draftOrderId)

View in ESHOPMAN Dashboard: Navigate to the ESHOPMAN dashboard and open the detail page for the draft order you just modified. The page will fail to render, displaying the 404 user not found error.

Expected vs. Actual Behavior

Expected Behavior: Ideally, the ESHOPMAN dashboard should gracefully handle activities performed by Admin API keys. Instead of crashing, it should display a generic message like "By API user" or "System Action" in the activity log, acknowledging that the action was performed programmatically rather than by a specific human user.
Actual Behavior: The draft order detail page crashes due to the unhandled 404 error during the user lookup for the API key ID.

Community Insight and Best Practices

This scenario highlights an important distinction between human user actions and programmatic actions via the ESHOPMAN Admin API. For developers building integrations, it's crucial to understand how API key activities are logged and displayed within the ESHOPMAN dashboard.

While a direct workaround for the dashboard crash isn't available from the API perspective, this insight serves as a valuable piece of community knowledge. It underscores the need for robust error handling within the ESHOPMAN dashboard itself to gracefully manage cases where activity is logged by non-human (API) users. Until such an update is implemented, developers should be aware of this potential display issue when using Admin API keys for draft order management and communicating this behavior to their merchant clients.

Understanding these nuances ensures a smoother experience when leveraging ESHOPMAN's headless capabilities and integrating with HubSpot for storefront management.

Resolving 404 Errors on ESHOPMAN Draft Order Details: A Deep Dive into Admin API User Context