before: hook not triggering for product.variant events — intentional?

[sebastian-meckovski]

We're building a Swell App that auto-calculates product prices from dimension attributes (width / height) using a before:product.updated hook. It works great for products — the price merges into the saved record before it's written, so the UI reflects it immediately with no extra round-trip.

We're now extending this to variants. We noticed that product.variant.updated and product.variant.created fire correctly as async events, but before:product.variant.updated / before:product.variant.created don't seem to trigger at all.

Our question: Is this intentional, or a gap in the current implementation?

Variants appear to be their own collection (products:variants) with the same field structure as products (they have price, purchase_options, $currency, etc.), so we'd expect before: hooks to work the same way. We can't find anything in the docs that explains the difference.

Why before: matters here specifically:

Not a massive issue but...

1. Immediate UI consistency — With before:, the calculated price is part of the same write. Any dependent fields in the admin UI (or the storefront) reflect the new value instantly. With async after:, there's a window where the variant is saved with a stale/null price until the second write completes.

2. Efficiency — Without before:, we have to do a follow-up req.swell.put to write the price back, which is (maybe?) an extra API call per variant save.

Is there a workaround we're missing, or is before: support for variant events on the roadmap?

Thanks

Here's the function:

export const config: SwellConfig = {
  description: 'Test: log when a product variant is updated',
  model: {
    events: ['product.variant.updated', 'product.variant.created'],
  },
};

export default async function (req: SwellRequest) {
  console.log('variant hook fired', JSON.stringify(req.data));
}

as soon as I prepend before: to the events array items, it stops working