Lets use this as a @laravelphp learning opportunity. We added a feature to let
@thankboxrecipients reply to everyone who had left a message on their Thankbox. Lets look at the code and see what happened 1/7
Hey, the unit test passed, but our integration one failed. Sorry to people that got spammed. We'll be extra careful now. 🙈🙈🙈
This is the code that ran (shortened for brevity) when a recipient replied. The comment makes it pretty clear what we *wanted* it to do. Pretty trivial, right? Get all the messages on this Thankbox that have an email attached or that have a user on them. 2/7
Why do we need that orWhereHas? It's because we don't require people to register in order leave a message on a Thankbox - for ease of use. They can just leave their email (contributor_email). We don't ask users for their email if they are logged in - we know it. 3/7
But we naively assumed that the orWhereHas would apply *just* to messages within the Thankbox we were querying. We were fooled by our unit tests, because in our tests we just created one thankbox and a few users so all assertions passed. 4/7
Instead, the SQL query that ended up being generated was this. Notice where the brackets are. It made our code send an email to people with messages on this Thankbox OR *everyone who has an account and has ever left a message anywhere* 🤦♂️ But hey, our tests were passing. 5/7
