Osama's Weblog

Last month Salesforce.com and PayPal announced Paypal X toolkit for Force.com Platform.

PayPal, as everybody knows is the most commonly used payment gateway in e-commerce world. The important points about PayPal are:

• Facilitates payments
• Pay anyone, receive from anyone
• Account management
• Tools for information and reporting

PayPal provides its APIs for integration with other e-commerce websites. They recently launched few changes in their system which are :

• Pre-approval APIs
• Refund
• Convert Currency
• Parallel Payments
• Chained Payments

Using Parallel payments, you can split a single payment to any number of receivers. For example, a person purchases different items from different sellers. The person doesn’t have to arrange separate transactions for each seller. What he can do is just arrange a single payment which can be distributed among all the sellers. Isn’t it great?

Using Chained payments, you can send one payment to specific merchant who can further sends the payment after keeping his share. For example, you buy a product through a sales rep of an organization. You can arrange a chained payment for this purpose. You will pay to the sales rep and which will be forwarded to the organization’s account after the share of sales rep is deducted.

Force.com PayPal X toolkit is a set of apex classes for accessing API more easily. You can access them through force.com IDE after installing them into your organization. It takes care of transport . It securely manages API credentials. There is a custom object where you store your API credentials. It also supports adaptive accounts. It is easy to access PayPal sandobx sandbox, beta and live environments.
To access it, sign up on X.com. Obtain application ID from MyApps page. Now, create PayPal sandbox test account and signup on  http://developer.paypal.com. Now, Create test accounts for sandbox and obtain API credentials.

Install PayPal X toolkit from code share.

There are sample codes available for every kind of request that PayPal supports.
Now you don’t have to waste your time in writing custom code to integrate PayPal into your system. Just modify the template classes in the toolkit (which is usually the change in API credentials and some other information as required).

More info on this can be found at webinar by salesforce.com.

Few days ago I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned that I wasn’t able to access apex:input field on a force.com site. With the help of a my blog reader, I figured out what was the problem. Its pretty straight forward.

You cannot give extra permissions to standard objects on a force.com site. But  you can give Modify All Data and View All Data permissions to a custom object . That means you can use apex:inputField on a force.com site which is bound to a custom object field. Make sure about field level security.

Thanks to Jason.

I came across a strange situation today when I was trying to use a apex:inputField tag and call it on a visualforce page through force.com site. But the field wasn’t visible when seen on public force.com site.

This is what I did

 public class testClass
          {
               public Account acc {get; set;}
          }

and here is the visualforce page

<apex:page   controller=”testClass”>
<apex:inputfield value=”{!acc.Name}”/>
</apex:page>

I also changed the permissions in Force.com guest user profile. But still I wasn’t able to make the field visible. I think its a limitation from security point of view.

If someone else has experienced the same thing or has any recommendations, do let me know.

I was deploying an apex class through Force.com IDE on a production environment. It was continuously giving me an error “An error occurred on your page”. I wasnt getting the message but on some googling I came to know that my class was using many pageReference methods which were returning some page. The problem was pages include the class as their controller and the in the class pages were being called. The deployment method is sequential on force.com IDE which was creating problem.

The pages were not deployed on the production environment and that is why it was giving me the error. I found a solution somehow. What I did was, removed the ‘return page.myPage’ from the class and include ‘return null’. The class was deployed. Then I deployed the pages. After the pages got deployed, I edited the class, replaced the ‘return null’ statement wirh “return page.MyPage”. This requires lot of rework but solved my problem.