I just wanted to share my experience using Corvid for the last 4 days straight, trying to build a “simple” shipping system which incudes:
- clients can enter there personal address (the address is checked with the shipping company if the address is valid)
- clients can enter to pick the items from the store from an office from the shipping company (getting those offices from the shipping company API)
- calculating the shipping price based on the weight of the items in the cart
- finally generating an order list with all orders that are not shipped yet and then generating a shipping label (using the shipping company API)
The issues I have faced:
- You can not change the product page or the cart page if you are using Wix Store which is a huge minus for us as we should not fully customize the experience of the client even with Corvid.
- All Collections that are default created by Wix like Orders, Products and so on are ONLY read only. Which is again an huge minus as I want to be able to change the price of the shipping base from the shipping company API. I can’t do that.
- You can’t get items in an unfinished order. This is a huge minus as well, because I want to be able to take all products in the current unfinished cart of the user and get all weight of the products and calculate the price of the shipping. I can’t do this.
- Support is only possible with an email. Even that we are partners of Wix, the only way of contacting Wix is email. It would be much faster and easier for developers like me to just ask quick questions the support team using a chat. I will do my work 10 times faster if there was a chat support function.
- Constant showing of errors, bug and simple not able to open Collections or any other problem you can think of. I will just name a few. Importing csv file to a Collection it is not working and it is not showing any errors of why it is not importing the file. I had to guess what could be the problem and they use the “try and error” method to finally guess the reason (after 5 hours). When the file was finally imported the columns had some issues (are coloured with an yellow icon) and I can’t sort or view the property name which I need to use in order to write the Corvid code, every time a member from the support team enters the editor I got an instant error and the site just stops working, super annoying if you are in a middle of something and you have not saved your progress, not able to open Collections, I have no idea why, but sometimes without any reason I could not open the Collection I want - “An error has occurred. Check your Internet connection and try again.” Is the only text I see and even refresh will not work which lead to immediately I have to stop my work if I want to see something in the Collection and I just can’t.
Overall to be honest I haven’t used any other websites other then Wix from this day I had only wrote my own code using mostly php/js and frameworks like Laravel and Vue.js and coming to this and having all those issues are driving me miles/km away from using Corvid in the feature. I will be more then happy if someone from the team can just comment on some of the issues and I will be more then happy to give all my data for analyse preposes just so other developers don’t get trough this as I do 
Best regards,
Dimitar
One more thing to the list:
- When you create a reference to the AbandonedCart Collection from other Collection you see only this text - Untitled and you have to guess to which row this record have reference to!?
A better approach would be to create your own database instead of using the Wix default databases, use these databases only to feed your database which then you can fully customize by coding your backend and frontend. One more thing use for data structure JSON objects you don’t really have to reference other databases this is actually a beginner’s approach but if you are a professional programmer better use JSON objects to create your data structures the way you need.
I’m coming from a Python/ flask and ReactJS / NodeJS background been using Corvid the last 3 years to offer advanced web applications to our clients, built over 50 web applications between direct clients and second contractor clients and so far my experience has been positive. Corvid as any framework has its own way and sometimes is useful to understand how the Wix editor works it can help a lot with routing etc.
If your experience so far has been 4 days using Corvid I highly recommend you explore different approaches, read all Corvid documentation as first and make sure you really do understand on a deep level the Wix editor.
Thank you Dev for taking the time and answer my post. You did wrote useful information. I didn’t think i could extract the data using from the Collections using JSON and also it sounds resalable enough to use my own backend server, but in this case I have to pay for a server account which is a minus.
I will defensibly try using my own backend. It sounds more easy for me and reliable then using Wix Collections.
Is it possible to extract also Wix default collections to the backend server as well. I guess the answer is Yes, but still I wanted to ask.
And how do you overcome the issue that you can’t write to the default Collections like Orders?
Thanks
@dimitar , sorry to hear you had a bad experience. Wanted to add that we recently had a bug related to import, which is now fixed. Please let us know if you still experience any issues with that!
@adas-bradauskas , thank you for answering me. After switching from Wix Collection to managing my data from an external server using JSON and post/get requests I had no problem using Wix. Almost all issues have gone, thanks to that. Con to that is that I have to pay for an external server now, but at this stage of Wix Collections they are not save and I can’t use them. They are very buggy. It will be great in the feature if you can create an environment for developers only, clean and only for code. This will speed up the loading of the pages and our work.
@dimitar You could simply create your own backend with Corvid. That was my recommendation well however an external backend works fine. If you decide to set up a backend with Corvid only keep in mind variables exist for around 204.417 seconds (3.40 minutes)
I actually calculated this time expiration, is somewhere in the forum.
What I do to overpass this situation is to save all important data in a Corvid database and pull the data from there. If my variables become undefined I just restore the variables by pulling back the data from the database and assigning back the data to the variables. How do I know if the variables come undefined by a try/catch block in the frontend, the catch runs as soon as the variables are undefined.
@asanchez92195 , what do you mean by Corvid database? It’s it Collections by Wix a Corvid Database? I prefer to use my own server and my own db as I can do whatever I want with it and I saw that it is not slower when I do that and the load time its the same which is great.
What do you mean by ‘variables exist for around 204.417 seconds’? Can you give me an example when such thing can happen? You mean when someone is at the website for more then this time the variables stop working after declaring then? I never heard of such a thing before 
Backend variables expire to keep cleaner and reduce unused memory in the servers. You have to keep this in mind and prevent it saving your important data in a Wix collection. Yes Corvid DB is a Wix collection…
