validate commerce order pre-placement

Question

A product in Drupal Commerce 2 has limited stock. Users can add-to-cart so long as there is a current stock value > 0, and stock is decremented at the order-placed stage. If a second concurrent user passes the order-placed stage first and has used all available stock, when user 2 gets to the order-placed stage I want to take action (remove item from cart, show a message, do something if no other items in cart..).

I am catching 'commerce_order.place.pre_transition' event, and can manipulate order items, but I'm not sure if I'll mess up other DC processes. Would it be better to have a CheckoutPane plugin to do something pre-placement at/after the Review stage, or something else? The action needs to be taken just pre payment attempt.

Answer 1

I created a CheckoutPane plugin which worked well in order-information step as it can can include form fields so can use form-validate function to stop progress until cart manually corrected. In theory the stock could change between order-information and review steps. The panel is automatically processed in review step but it is only a display string not a form so cannot enforce anything here.

It is possible to use HOOK_form_FORM_ID_alter (mymodule_form_commerce_checkout_flow_multistep_default_alter) which is called on submit of review step - so can add a validate function and stop things

The Pane approach gives a better UI space for explaining things to user as HOOK.. can mostly only generate a validation error.