magento2: Moving a category to a new parent does not generate 301 redirects for product URLs

Preconditions and environment

• Magento 2.4.6 and potentially all prior versions

Steps to reproduce

1. Install any recent version of Magento (2.4.4 - 2.4.6)
2. Enable the following settings under Catalog -> Catalog -> SEO
3. Create two categories under the root category with one child category under the first one.
4. Create a product and assign it to the child category.
5. Enable all categories and products.
6. Using the drag & drop feature of the category tree, move the child category to be underneath the second parent you created.
7. Navigate to Marketing -> URL Rewrites, and observe that a 301 redirect was created for the original category URL, but not for the original product URL within the original parent category.

Expected result

A 301 redirect will be created for every category / product URL path within the original parent category pointing to the new category / product path under the new parent category. Frontend visitors will get redirected to the new product URL path if they try to access the original path.

Actual result

A 301 redirect was created from the old category path to the new one, but no redirects were created for product URLs. Frontend visitors receive a 404 if they try to access the original product URL path.

Additional information

The issue appears to lie in this observer Magento\CatalogUrlRewrite\Observer\CategoryProcessUrlRewriteMovingObserver. It calls this method $this->urlRewriteHandler->deleteCategoryRewritesForChildren($category), which results in the product level rewrites being deleted before this method is run $productUrlRewriteResult = $this->urlRewriteHandler->generateProductUrlRewrites($category), which looks for those rewrites for the purpose of creating 301 redirects.

Release note

No response

Triage and priority

• Severity: S0 - Affects critical data or functionality and leaves users without workaround.
• Severity: S1 - Affects critical data or functionality and forces users to employ a workaround.
• Severity: S2 - Affects non-critical data or functionality and forces users to employ a workaround.
• Severity: S3 - Affects non-critical data or functionality and does not force users to employ a workaround.
• Severity: S4 - Affects aesthetics, professional look and feel, “quality” or “usability”.