Google Checkout Integration

Introduction

In a basic view, an e-Commerce system is a product list, a shopping cart and a checkout area. Many businesses will provide you with a shopping cart and checkout area. Often, they pass a small fee to your customers for their services. Sitefinity can provide you with a product list with the added benefit of built-in categories and tag lists. In this example, I shall use the EventsView with a Google Checkout button, demonstrating basic e-Commerce functionality with Sitefinity out of the box.

Installation

For the purposes of this demonstration, I shall provide you with the necessary files to install Google Checkout to allow users to pay for events. Here is how to install them:

1. Download the sample project, which is shown below this article
2. Using the same folder structure, copy the files into Sitefinity
3. In your Web.config and under the </configSections> tag, add the necessary app settings:


4. In your Web.config, add this line of code beneath the <metaFields> tag:



5. Login to your Sitefinity project.
6. Click on Pages
7. Select a page and click Edit this Page or Edit this Language Version if localization is turned on
8. From the toolbox on the right, drag and drop an EventsView
9. Click Edit on the EventsView
10. Click on the Advanced Tab
11. Expand the appearance section and under the ItemListTemplatePath property, enter this path:

~\Sitefinity\ControlTemplates\Events\ContentViewItemView.ascx

11. Click I'm done
12. Click Publish or Save, depending on the workflow settings.

If workflow is turned on, make sure that the page is approved and later published.

Obtaining an Google Merchant ID and a Google Merchant Key

For this example, we will use the Google Sandbox to do test sales. This will ensure that the orders are not processed while we do custom development. As with most 3rd party applications, you must obtain a user name and password to use their API. Often times, this is known as an API key with a special secret key. To obtain this info, please visit Google Checkout's website.

When this is complete, enter the data into the app settings keys of your application. If you'd like to use this in a production environment, you must change the App Settings Environment variable to production and obtain a production Merchant ID and Merchant key.

Create Events with a Price

Once this is complete, login to the CMS and click Modules > Events. Create some new events and add a price for them.

Checking out with Google

Now that this code has been inserted and you have events with prices, here is the end result:



Explaining the code

Google uses a special button control along with a method called AddItem. This method redirects the user to a URL, based on the product name, price and quantity. In this case, I passed the Event's meta data into this method. To get that data, I extracted the event's ID and passed the parameters into the EventManager's GetContent method. Here is the annotated code:


For more information about Google Checkout, please read Getting Started with Google Checkout. For more info on the Event's module's API please red our Developer Manual.