Strange adservice behavior. Is it intentional?

[madhead]

Bug Report

Version: v1.1.0 / 9a66c3a7e490dc0a30c738b92d931d04ce42f479 / main (just plain git clone)

Symptom

It seems that the request for the ad is crafted incorrectly. It results in random ads being served.

After a quick looking at the docs and scenarios it's not clear whether it's intentional or not.

What is the expected behavior?

Appropriate adds are served for every request.

What is the actual behavior?

Random ad is served for every request.

Reproduce

1. Open any product page. E.g. "Optical Tube Assembly": http://localhost:8080/product/9SIQT8TOJO. This 9SIQT8TOJO is a product id, right?
2. A request is seen in browser's developers console: http://localhost:8080/api/data?productIds=9SIQT8TOJO
3. This 9SIQT8TOJO is used to query adservice:

   opentelemetry-demo/src/frontend/pages/api/data.ts

   Line 12 in 9a66c3a

   const { ads: adList } = await AdGateway.listAds(productIds as string[]);

4. A request arrives in adservice:

   ad-service               | 2022-11-15 20:57:22 - hipstershop.AdService - received ad request (context_words=[9, S, I, Q, T, 8, T, O, J, O]) trace_id=e8c29c9773b16a424d5383acb41a2f15 span_id=ecd925196c0ed6c9 trace_flags=01
   

   
5. So this 9SIQT8TOJO is treated as ten separate context words.
6. The ads map doesn't contain any ads for any of these letters:

   opentelemetry-demo/src/adservice/src/main/java/hipstershop/AdService.java

   Lines 221 to 227 in 9a66c3a

   	return ImmutableListMultimap.<String, Ad>builder()
   	.putAll("binoculars", binoculars)
   	.putAll("telescopes", explorerTelescope)
   	.putAll("accessories", colorImager, solarFilter, cleaningKit)
   	.putAll("assembly", opticalTube)
   	.putAll("travel", travelTelescope)
   	.build();

7. Thus, no ads found and the ads request falls back to the getRandomAds any time.
8. This is also seen in Jaeger (all the requests have a call to the getRandomAds at the end):
   

Additional Context

N/A

[breedx-splk]

Yeah, the adservice API is only designed to receive product categories, not IDs. I think the invoker should be passing product categories instead of ids.

The complexity of the client-side stack is a little beyond me, but this line is suspect, as is this Ad.provider which seems founded on product IDs.

In turn, that provider is used in 3 pages: cart, order, and product.

I cant follow the types enough to know how much work it would be to pass categories. Products definitely have categories as a list of strings, but I can't tell how item or query relate to products here.

[madhead]

@breedx-splk, correct. If you agree that current behavior is a bug, please, check out the linked PR. ☝️