Refunds made on orders not visible through API

Refunds have their own endpoint in the API, have a look at the docs here : https://woothemes.github.io/woocommerce-rest-api-docs/#view-list-of-refunds-from-an-order

<?php print_r($woocommerce->get('orders/645/refunds')); ?>

Thank you Anand for your reply.

I had not realised that refunds were treated completely separate from the order that they referred to – I can’t really understand why.

So, to get the net value of an order I now have to make an API call for each order instead of just the one call to get all orders. That makes no sense to me.

Link the refund to it’s order and it’s 1 call to the endpoint get/orders.

As is, 1 call to get the orders and then (1 * no of orders) calls to check if there is a refund.

Can’t be right.

And how about coupons? They also have their own endpoint, but if used, key information is included in the order. So 1 call gets me all the information I need on an order.

Except refunds, of course.

Refunds are separate objects because changing past data is wrong for reporting purposes.

e.g. I have 1 order in Dec 2015, and refund in Jan 2016, the reports for 2015 should not be affected negatively.

Thank you Mike – I see the logic now.

Could I make a suggestion that the order includes a flag to indicate that there are refunds (future or otherwise) set when the refund(s) is/are made.

Then when the order is retrieved a simple test of the flag will determine whether a second call to the refunds endpoint is required to get the rest of the information associated with the order.

Dennis

From the API you mean? We do expose them in the UI.

From the UI is absolutely fine, no issues there.

From the API not quite as good.

Say there are 500 orders, 1 call to the endpoint get/orders gets all the information needed except refunds. It then requires 500 more API calls to see if there are any refunds associated with any particular order.

What I am suggesting is that a flag is set in the order when a refund is made against that order.

So, (bad pseudocode follows!):

Refund is made on order 453.
Flag ‘has_refund’ set to true on order 453.

Sometime later…..

List all orders (get/orders)
foreach order
Any refunds been made?
If true: make an API call to retrieve the refund.

As I assume most orders will not have refunds (in our case it would probably be around 0.5 – 1 per cent), the number of additional API calls is dramatically reduced.

As an afterthought I guess the other way of streamlining this would be to have a get/refunds endpoint (I can’t see one in the docs) which could possibly be even better. 1 call to get the orders, 1 call to get the refunds and your own code to do the heavy lifting.

Or both. ??

Dennis

I think this will be done in 2.7, but I’ll pitch to Claudio for inclusion. Ideally we’d have a new key (refunds) which returns refund IDs. And then this could be expanded on demand.

Thanks Mike.