we’re basically forced to update to 2026-07 if we want to support collections in any way in our apps, as older API version just completely ignore new collections.
In my case, merchant’s active collections are being marked as deleted, if they add new rules (I’m not sure how you convert an old collection to the new one, that’s my guess?), since I can no longer fetch those collections.
So:
merchant uses my app to export products from collection
merchants changes rules so that it’s now a new collection
old (supported) API version returns null for that collection
collection marked as deleted by my app, and no products exported
You can see why this is a problem, right?
Is this expected?
I’m gonna do a panic upgrade to 2026-07 and see what breaks.
@perice This lines up with how Shopify API versioning generally works: once a resource’s shape changes in a newer version - here, a collection getting migrated into the rule-based/flexible model - a call on an older version for that specific record tends to return null instead of a stale snapshot, because the old version literally can’t represent it anymore. That’s different from the collection being deleted, but from inside your app the symptom looks identical, which is the real problem to fix regardless of the exact mechanism.
I’d fix it at the app layer rather than only upgrading: don’t let a null response from the Collections call alone mark something as deleted. Before you write that state, do a secondary check against the Admin GraphQL API on your current highest supported version (a plain collection(id:) query) to confirm it’s actually gone rather than just unrepresentable at the old version. That protects you from the same failure mode next time a resource’s shape changes again.
Worth pulling up the 2026-07 API version release notes specifically for the collections section - Shopify documents version-to-version breaking changes there, and it should tell you whether this null-on-old-version behavior is the intended contract. If it isn’t documented anywhere, that’s worth flagging to Shopify support directly since silently returning null for an existing, active resource is a rough edge either way.
yes, that’s the catch with this update. They said it’s non breaking but it is. You have no choice to upgrade. Additionally the new collection is much more complex than before making the upgrade non trivial - sill we didn’t have a decent notice period to upgrade.
There are some issues as well you should be aware of. For example the most annoying one is that you can’t remove all items from a source, it will tell you that you need at least 1 item or 1 condition in the source.