Change control — Friday 4 September

Search has been finding the address of a photograph in six different places in its own code, each with the same address written into it as a last resort. This release replaces all six with one setting, and deliberately removes the last resort: if the setting is missing, the service refuses to start rather than quietly serving the old address.

Before — the live search service todayIts settings were read off the running service on Thursday. The list contains nineteen entries and the new one is not among them.

After — what Friday would doThe new version starts, does not find the setting, and stops. Because the platform only sends customers to a version that has started successfully, the version running today keeps every request. The result is a release that does not happen, not a store that breaks.

What it needsOne setting added to the live search service before the release is promoted. It takes about a minute, and its value is the address photographs are served from today, so nothing about what a customer sees changes.

WhoVova, before the promote. There is no way to do it from inside the release itself — the setting lives on the running service, not in the code.

The store website has to accept the new part-page address before search starts handing it out. The store website half is what answers a request; the search half is what writes the address into the sitemap, the shopping feed, and the links inside parts diagrams.

In the right orderThe store website goes first. For the few minutes between the two, search is still handing out old addresses, and the store website answers both the old and the new. Nothing is broken at any point.

In the wrong orderSearch hands out addresses that the store website does not yet answer. Every newly-issued link is a dead page until the second half lands, and the shopping feed and sitemap are the two places most likely to be read by a machine in that window.

Why it is a decision and not just a stepThe two halves are promoted by different mechanisms — the store website by merging, search by swapping the running image — so nothing enforces the order automatically. It has to be held by whoever runs the promote.

front#4020 is aimed directly at the live branch rather than at the integration branch every other change goes through. It is also a second copy of work that is already in this release: the chat widget arrived on 27 August and is in the list below.

Why it mattersA change that goes straight to the live branch skips the week of integration testing that everything else on this page has had, and it is the one shape of change the process is written to prevent.

The decisionClose it as already covered, or re-aim it at the integration branch so it rides a train. Either is fine; leaving it queued where it is, is not.

Open since 27 July. One hundred and twenty-two thousand five hundred and thirty-three parts currently hold a price that disagrees with the source. On 28 August the testing step moved to Vova, which is where it has sat since.

The decisionYes or no this week. It is not blocked by anything in this release; it is blocked by nobody having run the check.

The process has a Thursday step that copies the candidate to the test site so it can be checked before Friday. It did not run this week — the test site still holds what was put there on 21 August. The 28 August release also went straight out without it.

Why it keeps happeningThe person who held testing left on 20 August and the role was not filled. The step has no owner, so it is nobody’s to skip and nobody’s to run.

The decisionEither a named person checks the candidate before Friday, or the existing rule applies and anything unchecked is a no. Both are workable answers; the current state, where the rule exists and nothing enforces it, is not.

Recorded here so it is not mistaken for the first item. This release gives the heavy overnight index work its own restricted database login, so it cannot compete with customer searches. The login has not been created on the live service.

What happens without itThe work falls back to the shared login and writes a warning when the service starts. That is the behaviour today, so nothing gets worse — the isolation simply is not gained yet. Unlike the first item, this does not stop the release.

The gesture handling was written by hand and did not distinguish a drag on the diagram from a scroll of the page, so trying to move the drawing scrolled the page away from it. It is now handled by a maintained library that every mobile map uses, with the conventional rule: one finger pans, two fingers zoom.

Previously a callout identified a part and the customer had to find it again in the list below to buy it. The callout now leads to the purchase, and the row in the rail beneath the diagram is a buy surface rather than a legend — price, availability and an add button on the row itself.

A marker floated above the drawing to show which callout was selected, and on a phone it sat on top of the thing it was describing. Its two jobs moved into the rail. The callouts and the zoom controls were below the size a thumb can reliably hit and have been enlarged. The sheet that covers the lower half of the screen now closes with a downward swipe instead of a hunt for a small cross.

Before — the live store today/parts/ct-nhl-100016 answers 200. /parts/100016-nhl-ct answers not-found. An address typed in capitals redirects once to the lower-case form.

AfterThe two swap over, and every old address answers with a single permanent redirect to the new one. One hop, never two, which is what preserves the ranking a page has already earned.

Why do it at allThe part number is the thing a customer recognises and the thing they search for. Putting it first makes the address readable and puts the identifying term where both a person and a search engine look for it.

OrderSee the second item in the decisions above. This is the change that needs the two halves promoted in sequence.

Every segment of the remaining address families is now lower case, so the same page cannot be reached by two spellings. And a discontinued part no longer redirects to a replacement that has itself been discontinued — a chain that ended in a dead page.

Held parts were kept out of the sitemap but still linked from listings and diagrams, so Google found them by following links. Links now fail closed: if a part is not offered, no clickable link to it is written, on either the parts pages or the lookup pages.

Note for anyone checking the live store todayA check that finds dead links under the lookup pages is finding the problem this change fixes, not a new one. It has been on the integration branch since 3 September and reaches the live store on Friday.

Twenty-two changes, all the same shape: a filtered listing, a facet count, a brand page or an automated check applied the rule in one place and not in another, so the number shown and the rows shown disagreed. They now use one rule in one place. The visible effect is that a count matches what is on the page.

One that is a decision, not a fixOpening a brand to Google is now a recorded decision rather than something that happened automatically once a brand had enough rows. A brand with nothing worth offering hides itself instead of listing pages that answer not-found.

One that is about freshnessWhether a part is published is now read live rather than from a snapshot rebuilt overnight, so a part that becomes available is offered the same day rather than the next.

Six changes with one cause. The sidebar and the grid were built by different code paths, and the sidebar advertised cuts — price, top sellers, and others — that the grid never ran. A customer ticked a box and the results did not change. Two filters that had never applied anywhere were removed rather than fixed, because nothing was behind them.

Attachment and kit entries were being returned as if they were parts, leading to addresses that answer not-found. And when the site cannot work out which part a search means, it now shows the results page rather than guessing at a part page address that may not exist.

Recorded so the list adds up, not as news. A search matching exactly one part was answering with an error instead of showing it — the problem reported on the 28 August page as unresolved. It was fixed and pushed out on its own on 29 August. Separately, when search is struggling the site now remembers the failure briefly instead of retrying hard and making it worse; that went out on 1 September. Both are in this release properly.

When a part appears inside an assembly’s parts list, the stepper next to it was keyed off a value that two different rows could share, so changing the quantity on one could change it on another. It is now keyed off the identifier that is unique per row.

The event that records someone looking at a part had stopped firing, so the analytics figures for product views have been understated. It fires again, and reports the same identifier the rest of the site uses, so the numbers can be joined up.

The cart quoted a carrier estimate rather than what checkout actually charges, and the estimate described the pickup counter as if it were delivery. Both were pushed out on 30 August. Separately, a paid order that failed to record itself was being marked as handled, which meant nothing retried it; it is no longer marked handled unless the order exists. That went out on 29 August.

Before — measured ThursdayA photograph requested from the store's own address answers 200 as an image, cached for a week. But that request is currently passed through to the very service we are retiring. So a comparison taken on the live store today compares that service with itself and proves nothing — recorded here rather than presented as a measurement.

AfterThe store reads the photograph from storage directly. Only then can the intermediate service be switched off, which is a later week’s work.

A related fixOnce the store trusts its own address for images, one internal request began fetching from itself — and on the protected test environments that returns a login page, which was then cached as if it were a picture. It now reads from storage instead. Found before it reached the live store.

The settingThis is the half that needs the missing setting in the first decision above. The value is deliberately different per environment, so a single fixed value would have looked correct on the live store and blanked every photograph on the test site.

A customer can record the machines they own and keep photographs, manual PDFs and links against each one, so the parts they need are found from their own machine rather than from a catalogue search. The storage half is in the order services; the page half is on the store website behind a setting that does not exist on the live store.

Order, if it is ever switched onThe services half must be live first. This release carries it, so after Friday the switch becomes possible — it does not become set.

Bin-stock hardware — bolts, fasteners and similar — as its own section. It ships off and should stay off for a specific measured reason: of the 629 hardware part numbers, 585 do not exist in the catalogue at all, and 44 collide with a New Holland part carrying the same number. A dedicated off switch was added after the section was built, so it can be stopped without withdrawing the release.

The decision, for a later weekNot whether to switch it on, but what to do about 44 numbers meaning two different parts.

The widget reads its configuration from a setting that does not exist on the live store, so it does not load. Confirmed by reading the live store’s settings on Thursday rather than by assuming. See the third decision above about the duplicate copy of this work.

Parts that carry a tiered price but no straightforward one become buyable, behind a setting. That setting was read off the live search service on Thursday and it is already on. So this one takes effect immediately on promote — it is listed here because grouping it with the switched-off work would have been wrong.

Where two models share a name, the page now names what distinguishes them and fills in the column showing what each part fits. An earlier attempt at this was closed without shipping, so this is genuinely new for the live store rather than a repeat.

Space for the second line of the heading is now reserved, so the view control below it does not move under the cursor as the page settles. Seven brand-hub addresses that no longer lead anywhere were removed.