I am needing to integrate Sage Pay on our website to accept online payments.
I have downloaded and tested the PHP kit provided by Sage and have run a few successful tests, however, I don't know where to start when it comes to integrating this with Cake PHP.
If anybody has some initial pointers or ideas, or even links (multiple, varied Google searches yielded nothing) that would be great ...
Many thanks,
Dave
Hi there,thanks for the reply, and apologies for the delayed replying myself. I have it all working now, except my final issue as that I need to parse the final response returned from SagePay. The demo has the following code in the final step that gets posted to my site (to an action), The code they have is as follows:
...
$strVPSSignature=$_REQUEST["VPSSignature"];
$strStatusDetail=$_REQUEST["StatusDetail"];
...
Obviously this won't work due to Cake's routing. How do you suggest I parse these value>
Thanks again.
Dave
Haven't used Sagepay but a few pointers anyway:
Third party PHP classes should be loaded as vendors, so that is what I would do with their PHP kit.
This guy thinks SagePay's kit is a mess so you might find using his classes is easier to grok.
Although some might say payments belong in the business layer (your model), you might find it easier to initially perform payments from the controller layer. As such, I would start by creating a simple component with the inputs and outputs you need (methods/parameters/return values) and use it as a wrapper for the SagePay vendor of your choice. This will help keep your controller actions skinny. You can refactor later to your taste once you get things working.
Related
Is there any way to auto-generate Swagger documentation (or similar) for a Nancy service?
I found Nancy.Swagger, but there's no information on how to use it and the demo application doesn't seem to demonstrate generating documentation (if it does, it's not obvious).
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
In my current project I've been looking a lot into this problem. I used both nancy.swagger and nancy.swagger.attributes.
I quickly discarded Nancy.swagger, because for me personally it doesn't sound right that you have to create a pure documentation class for each nancy module. The attributes solution was a bit "cleaner" - at least codebase and documentation were in one place. But very fast this became unmaintainable. Module code is unreadable because of many attributes. Nothing is generated automatically: you have to put path, all parameters, even http method as an attribute. This is a huge effort duplication. Problems came very fast, a few examples:
I changed POST to PUT in Nancy and forgot to update [Method] attribute.
I added a parameter but not the attribute for it.
I changed parameter from path to query and didn't update the attribute.
It's too easy to forget to update the attributes (let alone documentation module solution), which leads to discrepancies between your documentation and actual code base. Our UI team is in another country and they had some trouble using the APIs because docu just wasn't up-to-date.
My solution? Don't mix code and documentation. Generating docu from code (like Swashbuckle does) IS ok, but actually writing docu in code and try to dublicate the code in docu is NOT. It's not better than writing it in a Word document for your clients.
If you want Swagger docu, just do it the Swagger way.
- Spend some time with Swagger.Editor and really author your API in
YAML. It looks all-text and hard, but once you get used to it, it's
not.
- Spend some time with Swagger.Codegen and adapt it (it already does a fair job for generating Nancy server code and with a few
adjustments to moustache templates it was just what I needed).
- Automate your process: write a couple of batches to generate your modules and models from yaml and copy them to your repository.
Benefits? Quite a few:
-
Your YAML definition is now the single truth of your REST contract.
If somewhere something is defferent, it's wrong.
Nancy server code is auto-generated
Client code-bases are auto-generated (in our case it's android, ios and angular)
So whenever I change something in REST contract, all codebases are regenerated and added to projects in one batch. I just have to tell the teams something was updated. They don't have to look through some documents and search for it. They just have their code regenerated and probably see some compile errors, in case of breaking changes.
Do I still use nancy.swagger(.annotations)?
Yes, I do use it in another project, which has just one endpoint with a couple of methods. They don't change often. It's not worth the effort to set up everything, I have my swagger docu fast up and running. But if your project is big, API is changing, and you have multiple code-bases depending on your API, my advice is to invest some time into a real swagger setup.
I am quoting the author answer here from https://github.com/khellang/Nancy.Swagger/issues/59
The installation should be really simple, just pull down the NuGet package, add metadata modules to describe your routes, and hit /api-docs. That should get you the JSON. If you want to add swagger-ui as well, you have to add that manually right now.
No. Not in an automated. https://github.com/yahehe/Nancy.Swagger needs lots of manually created metadata.
There is a nice article here: http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/generating-api-document-in-nancy-using-swagger/
Looks like you still have to add swagger-ui separately.
Thanks in advance for any help offered and patience for my current web-coding experience.
Background:
I'm currently attempting to develop an web based application for my family's business. There is a current version of this system I have developed in C#, however I want to get the system web-based and in the process learn cakephp and the MVC pattern.
Current problem:
I'm currently stuck in a controller that's supposed to take care of a PurchaseTicket. This ticket will have an associated customer, line items, totals etc. I've been trying to develop a basic 'add()' function to the controller however I'm having trouble with the following:
I'm creating a view with everything on it: a button for searching customer, a button to add line items, and a save button. Since I'm used to developing desktop applications, I'm thinking that I might be trying to transfer the same logic to web-based. Is this something that would be recommended or do'able?
I'm running into basic problems like 'searching customer'. From the New Ticket page I'm redirecting to the customer controller, searching and then putting result in session variable or posting it back, but as I continue my process with the rest of the required information, I'm ending up with a bit of "spaghetti" code. Should I do a multi part form? If I do I break the visual design of the application.
Right now I ended up instantiating my PurchaseTicket model and putting it in a session variable. I did this to save intermediate data however I'm not sure if instantiating a Model is conforming to cakephp standards or MVC pattern.
I apologize for the length, this is my first post as a member.
Thanks!
Welcome to Stack Overflow!
So it sounds like there's a few questions, all with pretty open-ended answers. I don't know if this will end up an answer as such, but it's more information than I could put in a comment, so here I go:
First and foremost, if you haven't already, I'd recommend doing the CakePHP Blog Tutorial to get familiar with Cake, before diving straight into a conversion of your existing desktop app.
Second, get familiar with CakePHP's bake console. It will save you a LOT of time if you use it to get started on the web version of your app.
I can't stress how important it is to get a decent grasp of MVC and CakePHP on a small project before trying to tackle something substantial.
Third, the UI for web apps is definitely different to desktop apps. In the case of CakePHP, nothing is 'running' permanently on the server. The entire CakePHP framework gets instantiated, and dies, with every single page request to the server. That can be a tricky concept when transitioning from desktop apps, where everything is stored in memory, and instances of objects can exist for as long as you want them to. With desktop apps, it's easier to have a user go and do another task (like searching for a customer), and then send the result back to the calling object, the instance of which will still exist. As you've found out, if you try and mimic this functionality in a web app by storing too much information in sessions, you'll quickly end up with spaghetti code.
You can use AJAX (google it if you don't already know about it) to update parts of a page only, and get a more streamlined UI, which it sounds like something you'll be needing to do. To get a general idea of the possibilities, you might want to take a look at Bamboo Invoice. It's not built with CakePHP, but it's built with CodeIgniter, which is another open source PHP MVC framework. It sounds like Bamboo Invoice has quite a few similar functionalities to what you're describing (an Invoice has line items, totals, a customer, etc), so it might help you to get an idea of how you should structure your interface - and if you want to dig into the source code, how you can achieve some of the things you want to do.
Bamboo Invoice uses Ajax to give the app a feel of 'one view with everything on it', which it sounds like you want.
Fourth, regarding the specific case of your Customer Search situation, storing stuff in a session variable probably isn't the way to go. You may well want to use an autocomplete field, which sends an Ajax request to server after each time a character is entered in the field, and displays the list list of suggestions / matching customers that the server sends back. See an example here: http://jqueryui.com/autocomplete/. Implementing an autocomplete isn't totally straight forward, but there should be plenty of examples and tutorials all over the web.
Lastly, I obviously don't know what your business does, but have you looked into existing software that might work for you, before building your own? There's a lot of great, flexible web-based solutions, at very reasonable prices, for a LOT of the common tasks that businesses have. There might be something that gives you great results for much less time and money than it costs to build your own solution.
Either way, good luck, and enjoy CakePHP!
I am developing a basic yet highly customized CRM for a small training centre which has the ability to store student records and also send emails to them. I'm using SwiftMailer following this excellent tutorial in CakePHP to accomplish the sending part.
Of course, students are sometimes going to reply to emails and I'd like to retrieve them within my CRM and store them along with the student record.
However, I cannot find a single reference to doing this. I've tried the following Google searches: "receiving email cakephp" , "retrieving email cakephp" and even "email client cakephp" but all of these queries give results relating to sending mail rather than receiving it -- very frustrating!
Finally, I broadened my search to non-cake solutions and found someone recommending a library called ezComponents. It doesn't seem to have had any active development for about a year, but it includes an email receiving class which is exactly what I want. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to add this to CakePHP and the only post I've been able to find on the entire web on the matter doesn't exactly go into much detail. It's certainly not a step-by-step tutorial on using ezComponents on CakePHP like the SwiftMailer tutorial I mentioned above.
I also found a class on Google Code called php-imap which looks like it would do the job but, again, I haven't the slightest clue how to get it working happily in Cake like SwiftMailer is.
I realize that I may have to learn how to package classes for use in Cake by myself but I'm asking this question first on the off-chance that there is already a Cake-friendly solution to this problem that I just haven't realized :-)
Joseph
Thanks to everyone for your answers, but I've been doing some more searching and it looks like the solution is actually incredibly simple.
Basically, with the help of a plugin, I can set up the mail server in databases.php as a datasource and then write a Model and Controller to interact with it.
Here's the example I found: https://github.com/kvz/cakephp-emails-plugin
Edit: the repo has been deprecated and is now available at https://github.com/kvz/deprecated/tree/cakephp-emails-plugin
You will want to pipe your email to PHP and use stdin:// to read the contents of the email and add the e-mail to your database.
I've done this with cake and the simplest way is to make a Cake console application to handle the parsing. Also using cpanel's account level filtering to generate the pipe is really simple.
http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/piping-mail-php-scripts-howto-checklist-50985.html
http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php
Sounds like you want to include SwiftMailer as a Cake plugin, amirite?
http://book.cakephp.org/view/1111/Plugins
-- if you want to package it yourself. Otherwise, a cursory search of the Bakery yielded this result:
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/sky_l3ppard/2009/11/07/updated-swiftmailer-4-xx-component-with-attachments-and-plugins
Hopefully it will at least get you pointed in the right direction. HTH. :)
I know it has great out-of-the-box features but is it easy to customize?
Like when I query stuff from the database or change css layouts.
Is it faster to create my own modules for it or just go on and write everything from scratch using frameworks like Cake
I'm currently working on an Elgg-based site and I absolutely hate it. The project was near completion when I stepped in, but the people who created were no longer available, so I took it over as a freelancer.
As a personal impression, you are much better off writing the app from scratch in a framework. I don't know if the people before me butchered it, but the code looks awful, the entity-based relationship model is wierd to say the least and debugging is horrendous. Also, from my point of view, it doesn't scale very well. If you were to have a consistent user base, I'd be really really worried.
It keeps two global objects ($vars and $CONFIG) that have more than 5000(!) members loaded in memory on each page. This is a crap indicator.
I've worked extensively with cake. With Elgg, for about a month in a project that is on QA stage right now.
My advise is: if you need something quick with a lot of features and you only need to customize a little, go with Elgg.
If you're going to customize a lot and you can afford the development of all the forums, friends, invites, etc. features, go with Cake or any other MVC framework.
I have been working on a Elgg site for the past month or so, its code is horrible, however it's not the worst I've seen :D. it's not built for programmers like Drupal is :D. But it's not too bad. Once I got a handle on the metadata functions and read most of the code I was able to navigate it well and create custom modules and such.
What would help immensely would be some real documentation and explanation of the Elgg system. I don't think that's going to happen though :).
Out of the box there are a few problems, there are some bugs that haven't been fixed for a while and I've had to go in and fix them myself. Overall, you can make it pretty and it has some cool functions, but i wouldn't dive in until i had read the main core code to get a handle on what's happening on the backend.
Oh and massive use of storing values in globals. and a crap ton of DB calls (same with Drupal though).
i wonder if the use of storing everything, and i mean everything for your site in the globals will really hinder the server if you have a massive user load.
If you want to build a product based on a social networking platform/framework then Elgg is definately a good way to go. The code is not that bad if you actually look before leaping and doing what elgg expects. You go against its processes and structures and it will leave you beaten by the side of the road.
Developing modules/plugins or editing CSS is easy and Elgg does give you great flexability to basically build your own product ontop of it. Dolphin, as comparrison, does not allow you to do anything outside of what it expects you to do.
If you however just need a framework (not primarily for social networking etc) with some user based functionality then i suggest Cake, or if your project is HUGE then maybe Symfony or Zend. They all have plugins you can download and use/hack which would be easirer to adjust for personalised needs.
To show what you can do with elgg here is a site Mobilitate we built with Elgg 1.7. This is a very complicated website and was built ontop of Elgg.
We are starting a new project with Elgg 1.8. The new version is a major improvement they have made a lot of elements easier, incorporated better JS and CSS implementation/structure and have better commented their own code.
Elgg's database schema is horrific. They've essentially implemented a NoSQL database in SQL. It completely defeats the purpose of using a relational table structure.
If you can ignore this, and aren't doing much customization, you might be OK with Elgg. If not, STAY AWAY.
I've been working with Elgg for over a year. It is easier to customize than it would be to build something from scratch using a framework like CakePHP. I tried CakePHP and found it even more complicated than Elgg.
It is difficult to query the database due to the entity-based relationship model. You should use the build-in methods for accessing data. However, I have written many queries to double check on what is actually stored in the database.
You cannot change layouts using CSS alone. You have to deal with the various Elgg views. But CakePHP uses the same Model/View/Controller MVC concept so that would be just as difficult.
I'm implementing an Apache 2.0.x module in C, to interface with an existing product we have. I need to handle FORM data, most likely using POST but I want to handle the GET case as well.
Nick Kew's Apache Modules book has a section on handling form data. It provides code examples for POST and GET, which return an apr_hash_t of the key+value pairs in the form. parse_form_from_POST marshalls the bucket brigade and flattens it into a buffer, while parse_form_from_GET can simply reference the URL. Both routines rely on a parse_form_from_string routine to walk through each delimited field and extract the information into the hash table.
That would be fine, but it seems like there should be an easier way to do this than adding a couple hundred lines of code to my module. Is there an existing module or routines within apache, apr, or apr-util to extract the field names and associated data from a GET or POST FORM into a structure which C code can more easily access? I cannot find anything relevant, but this seems like a common need for which there should be a solution.
I switched to G-WAN which offers a transparent ANSI C scripts interface for GET and POST forms (and many other goodies like charts, GIF I/O, etc.).
A couple of AJAX examples are available at the GWAN developer page
Hope it helps!
While, on it's surface, this may seem common, cgi-style content handlers in C on apache are pretty rare. Most people just use CGI, FastCGI, or the myriad of frameworks such as mod_perl.
Most of the C apache modules that I've written are targeted at modifying the particular behavior of the web server in specific, targeted ways that are applicable to every request.
If it's at all possible to write your handler outside of an apache module, I would encourage you to pursue that strategy.
I have not yet tried any solution, since I found this SO question as a result of my own frustration with the example in the "Apache Modules" book as well. But here's what I've found, so far. I will update this answer when I have researched more.
Luckily it looks like this is now a solved problem in Apache 2.4 using the ap_parse_form_data funciton.
No idea how well this works compared to your example, but here is a much more concise read_post function.
It is also possible that mod_form could be of value.