Easy Digital Download Confusion

Once a customer has purchased more than one download from your Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) e-commerce shop, and especially if they have renewed their purchases year-over-year, there will be a source of confusion for them in their account pages, if/when they go to fetch a download file.

The list of downloads will include duplicate links in table rows, and the customer might not know which link to click to get the latest file. In fact, all the links with the same title are the same download. But how are they to know that? Why should they have to suss all that out, when it should just be a quick grab-n-go?

I get asked about this repeatedly, so I decided to code in a fix. I initially thought I’d solve this problem using the ‘edd_before_download_history‘ action hook in the ‘easy-digital-downloads/templates/history-downloads‘ template file, but that action hook doesn’t include the $orders variable, and that’s a shame because I can’t conditionally show a message if the customer has more than one download, e.g.

if ( count( $orders ) > 1 ) {
    // Then show an awkward message, like:
    echo 'awkward message explaining how all the links below with the same title are actually to the same file.';
}

I’d have to put my awkward message in the template if I wanted to be at least minimally awkward about my message (I mean, only showing it to customers with more than one order). Sigh.

And so I ended up uploading a template override after all, which I try to avoid because updating templates every time EDD updates the parent templates is a pain. That said, I’ve updated EDD and WooCommerce templates so many hundreds of times I could almost do it with my eyes closed. That doesn’t mean it’s fun. I wish EDD would include some $variables in more of its action hooks.

Here’s what I did. I added some logic such that the $orders variable contains orders by DATE, in descending (DESC) order. That way, when the orders are looped through in the template, as they already are, I can collect item product IDs in an array. If that item product ID is already shown, I won’t show it again:

First, add two lines after line 31, to add to the edd_get_order query args:

'type'           => 'sale',
'status__not_in' => array( 'trash', 'refunded', 'abandoned' ),
'order'          => 'DESC', // add this line
'orderby'        => 'date_created', // add this line, too!

Next, add one line after line 51, so it looks more like this:

$prod_ids = [];
foreach ( $orders as $order ) :

Finally, add 6 lines of code after line 53, so it looks like this:

foreach ( $order->get_items_with_bundles() as $key => $item ) :

    if ( in_array( $item->product_id, $prod_ids ) ) {
        continue; // download link is already shown
    }
    if ( $item->is_deliverable() ) {
        $prod_ids[] = $item->product_id;
    }

Makes it much easier for a customer to just get their download without guesswork, which is what EDD is all about, right?

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