bug(plugin-ecommerce): duplicate variant check ignores drafts

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#19,020 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

@lazerg is already working on this.

Since Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
nodejs, sqlite, typescript
Domain
backend, databases

Research direction

Read packages/plugin-ecommerce/src/collections/variants/createVariantsCollection/hooks/validateOptions.ts, especially the findByID lookup and variant exclusion filter. Run the reproduction's pnpm test:int in variant-duplicate-check-ignores-drafts/ to see the failure. Done means publishing variant B succeeds after variant A's options change is saved as a draft; an open linked pull request is already addressing this issue.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Bug
Describe the Bug

The ecommerce plugin validates that no two variants of a product use the same options combination. The check in validateOptions loads the product's variants join with findByID without draft: true, so it compares against the other variants' published options. Variants have drafts, and changes saved as a draft don't touch the published values.

So when a variant's options are corrected in a draft, its old combination still counts as taken. Creating variants, fixing their options as drafts, and then publishing them one by one fails with "This variant combo is already in use by another variant", although no variant uses that combination any more. The variant stays unpublished until the other variant is published first.

The check should read the latest drafts. Note that with draft: true the join's id: { not_equals: data.id } filter no longer excludes the variant being validated (at least on SQLite), so that variant then has to be excluded from the results by ID instead. Otherwise it is compared with itself and every publish is rejected.

This affects both v3 and v4: the same code ships in 4.0.0-beta.4 and is on main.

Link to the code that reproduces this issue

https://github.com/jhb-software/payload-issue-reproductions/tree/main/variant-duplicate-check-ignores-drafts/

Reproduction Steps
  1. Clone this repo and open the variant-duplicate-check-ignores-drafts/ directory
  2. pnpm install
  3. pnpm test:int: the test publishes variant A with the option "Small", changes A to "Large" in a draft, creates variant B as a draft with "Small", and publishes B.

Publishing B is rejected:

× compares against the latest draft of the other variants' options
AssertionError: promise rejected "ValidationError: The following field is invalid: Variant options" instead of resolving
Which area(s) are affected?

plugin: ecommerce

Environment Info
Relevant Packages:
  payload: 3.92.0
  @payloadcms/plugin-ecommerce: 3.92.0
  @payloadcms/db-sqlite: 3.92.0
Node: 22.23.3, pnpm: 11.5.1, darwin arm64
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
45.6k
Forks
4.4k
Avg merge
1d 15h
Merged PRs (30d)
280

Getting set up

Open in Codespaces

Starts the project's dev container in your browser, under your own GitHub account.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from payloadcms/payload

All issues in payloadcms/payload

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.