woocommerce_update_product action – fire only once for every product update

Question

Which workaround is there for making the woocommerce_update_product action fire only once?

I've read that it fires twice because it needs to save once internally to retrieve an ID for images/variation saves.

But from a developer experience, this is really not what most need, I guess.

The only workaround I've found so far is to add the action and remove it in the hook directly:

add_action('woocommerce_update_product', 'my_product_update', 10, 2);
function my_product_update($product_id, $product){
    remove_action('woocommerce_update_product');
    // We'll get here only once!
}

However, this breaks when trying to do bulk edits, making it so that the hook only fires for the first product (because it gets removed afterwards!).

Which other way is there to work around this issue?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Maybe using WordPress Transient can help.

add_action('woocommerce_update_product', 'my_product_update', 10, 2);
function my_product_update($product_id, $product) {

    $updating_product_id = 'update_product_' . $product_id;
    if ( false === ( $updating_product = get_transient( $updating_product_id ) ) ) {
        // We'll get here only once! within 2 seconds for each product id;
        // run your code here!
        set_transient( $updating_product_id , $product_id, 2 ); // change 2 seconds if not enough
    }
}

Answer 2

Use a global variable to do this in memory, no database entry required:

add_action('woocommerce_update_product', 'my_product_update', 10, 2);
function my_product_update($product_id, $product){
    global $previous_product_id;
    if ($previous_product_id === $product_id){
        // We'll get here only once (per product)!
    }
    $previous_product_id = $product_id;
}

Answer 3

i ran into the same issue (actually my hook was firing 5 times). I found a solution on the following page in the last comment.

Namely, the use of:

$times = did_action('woocommerce_update_product');
if( $times === 1){
    //  Do some stuff
}