I had this discussion in my workplace and wanted to share and get opinions from the folks here. (I suspect StackOverflow might not appreciate such open ended questions).
Context: We have a microservice involved in pricing signalling to our users. We have an endpoint which have the following:
- Input: an array of item ID’s
- Output: the expected final price of the given items.
The item prices are quite volatile (and no, it is not crypto related), and is dependent on things like instantaneous supply-demand, promotions, etc.
Since the prices change quite frequently, it became a requirement that we commit to the price that was shown to the user initially, up to a certain time period (eg 5 min after the price was calculated). This improves the UX since the user will be charged as according to what they expected at the start.
Currently, in our system, we achieve this via a JWT, which contains all the details in the request, the obligatory signature, and the expiry set to 5 min from the time it was generated.
After generating this receipt, the FE can then call the endpoint with the JWT which does the actual payment processing using the params encoded in the token. This way, we know that the params + the total cost that is quoted in the JWT originates from our service since we verify that we signed it.
And the system evolves once more. We see that in the system, there is this mechanism, that if the token is expired, we do not reject the request at the charging step. Instead, we call the price endpoint internally using the params provided, and check if the price is the same as in the expired JWT. If it is the same, we process it as normal despite the JWT being expired.
This is where the contention lies. I believe that we should force the user to procure another non-expired JWT and removing this complex logic while others believe in the value of this improved UX where the user doesn’t need to restart the whole flow again.
What do y’all think? Which way would y’all architect the endpoint? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with our design (maybe JWT is not the best suited for this use case)?
If I were a user, and the system told me that it was aware of what I wanted to do, and capable to do it, and it was in both of our financial best interests that the system fulfill my request, but it was deciding not to until I went back and jumped through an additional pointless hoop, before doing what I’d attempted to do in the first place… I definitely would be more irritated than not.
It might be worth having a prominent notification that the system was fulfilling the expired request, so it’s not confusing that the expired tickets work sometimes and not other times. Or, maybe just tell them the JWT they’ve got is expired, and ask them yes or no if they want the new (current) price instead, and update it transparently if they say yes. You can have a higher price if it’s higher, and depending on your relationship with the customers, you could either lower the price if it’s lower or just leave it at the current price and have them get what they get. But I would definitely make things easy and smooth for the customer in this type of situation as opposed to making the system easy to make, at the expense of having them have to click through a little circular runaround when the system is aware of exactly what they’re trying to do.
they’re talking about an API though, which changes the game a bit. i agree regarding the UX of the situation, but i don’t think the API is the right place to do something like that
the API should follow the theory of least surprise, and always work the same rather than follow some unwritten rule in certain situations. i say this for 2 reasons (that i can think of right now):
you can implement the same functionality in the client app pretty easily which, IMO, is where UX lives. perhaps putting an expiry with “prices refresh in 5min” to get around the complexity of the fact that prices may or may not change or stay the same… i don’t think anyone enjoys when their ride share surge price changes after the app “times out” searching for driver (as in something out of their control, like an opaque timeout) but if they know the amount of time they have they feel in control
100% agreed. Make the API clear and sensible, and make the UI utilize the API in such a way that the user gets the behavior they expect.
Based on this, it seems like you’re suggesting to move the logic closer to the frontend and leave the auto-refetching logic out of the backend?
The more I look at the responses, the more I feel this is a front-end problem to be solved rather than the backend’s.
Yeah. I didn’t get that from your post somehow that this was an API question – but I agree 100%; make the API clean and single-transactional, and make the frontend still present sensible behavior to the users.