Integration and Testing

[seekay]

Can a customer payment profile contain both a 'creditCard' and a 'bankAccount' payment type? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but isn't very clear from looking at the documenation.

If not, is there any other way to implement this without create 2 payment profiles, one with 'creditCard' and the other with 'bankAccount'?

Thanks!

[NSS]

The “Payment” (and its children filed names) can be used to store both credit card and bank account information in the customer profile

To store credit card profile you can use the following:

creditCard
cardNumber
expirationDate
cardCode

To store bank account information in the payment profile use:

bankAccount
accountType
routingNumber
accountNumber
nameOnAccount
bankName
 
For more information refer to page 17 in the CIM SOAP guide.

Hope this helps

[seekay]

Actually, page 12 mentions 'Can contain CreditCardSimpleType or BankAccountType.' which means that it supports only one, not both. Kinda limiting for a "Customer Info Mgr", don't you think?

Also, has only one field for a phoneNumber - what if I have home, work, cell?

Thanks anyways!

[itdevworks]

In terms of storing bankAccount vs. creditCard, this is why CIM allows you to have more than one PaymentProfile per CustomerProfile.  Each PaymentProfile represents a single method of payment for a customer.

[seekay]

Yep - made sense as I thought about it some more. Does CIM allow you to create a few 'custom' fields that you can then populate via the API? Either in the paymentProfile or as part of the main customer profile?

Thanks!

[itdevworks]

No, there is no "custom field" feature in CIM.  My guess is they have to walk a fine line between fulfilling the intended purpose of enabling PCI-DSS compliance by allowing you to store the payment information up there while not becoming your sole customer database.  While you could use CIM as a customer database for a small number of customers, the API is not designed to support this scenario.  First of all, there is no "batch" submit or, more importantly, query calls.  Each operation you want to perform requires a separate call to their service.  If you want to retrieve 1000 customer profile records, you have to make 1000 web service calls, which is very expensive.  Second, as you point out with your question, you are limited to the schema they offer, there are no user-defined fields. 

[seekay]

Thanks, Dave - that's very helpful information. I guess I'll store the non-essential info locally and maybe use the CIM customer 'description' field to store one last sensitive piece of information (coz of the PCI compliance).

Much appreciated.

[hotslots132]

More important, CIM is much too restrictive as to character set to serve as a customer database - it won't accept any international characters (accented letters, etc.) or even the "&" character in fields.