The experience between creating POS extensions and Checkout Extensions is pretty different when it comes to leveraging resource based metafields (customer, product etc). They’re easily accessible in the online checkout, but POS is not so slick.
Having to create a backend to go query the data to then send back to our extensions is an frustrating one and creates a load of additional overheads compared to checkout extensions.
Curious to know if we’ll ever have native access to metafields in POS extensions and functions or if we’ll need to continue with the current approach?
AFAIK there’s no way to access metafields like we can in Checkout UI Extensions, for example. The current standard way of doing this is to make a Proxy call to the app and retrieve metafields - pretty cumbersome and a huge blocker for me personally from building something super feature rich for PoS
So that changelog threw me off too - I immediately jumped to the conclusion that we have access to metafields on PoS but when reading the docs there was nothing, and then it hit me it’s not in dev changelogs and there was some level of disappointment there.
Though if they released customer metafields, I’m sure it’s safe to assume they’re also working on metafields hooks for PoS Extensions too and we should see it in 2025-01 / 2025-04 release?
@Liam-Shopify do you know if there’s any plans for this to become a reality (direct access to metafields in POS extensions)? Would really empower things on the POS front
@Lewis Yes, there are plans for this to become a thing where we will have Direct API access to metafields via POS UI extensions the same way that we have it for Admin UI Extensions. Don’t have a timeline to share, however, it is on our radar.
Just wanting to revisit this topic again and keep the conversation going. We’re also very keen for direct metafield access via POS UI Extensions. Hoping this is added soon
Ideally, it’s not limited to just the metafields. But rather just direct access to the Shopify Admin API. All the individual “API’s” don’t really make a lot of sense IMHO as it limits Shopify POS in what would otherwise be possible.
Would be great if we can get a Direct API access to the Admin API itself. Like we would have in Admin UI extensions.
Direct API access would be the best, but honestly even preloading shop metafields (which contain app configuration) would provide huge performance boost (so each extension open doesn’t have to hit app server on the load).
