Integration and Testing

[Talentville]

At my website, I maintain my own profiles for my registered users, which contains names, address and all that without any credit card or bank data.  

In creating a customer profile with CIM, the only data that is separate from a payment profile (other than a description and internal ID) is the customer's email address, so creating a generic profile for a new member is fairly easy but contains no real info that is of use int eh payment process.

What I would like to do is to save the member's name, address, phone umber and all that within CIM, but I need to do this before they have purchased anything (updating it every time they edit their profile?).  Then, when the user actually wants to buy something, I would show that payment profile and if the user did not previously enter their credit card info, they could do it then.

The problem is that in setting up a payment profile for a customer, CIM requires me to submit payment info, which seems crazy.  Why does the customer table at CIM not save default name and address data and when I need my member to enter a credit card to buy something, it pre-populates the payment profile wth the data i already have for the member?

The other alternative is for me not to try to create a paymetn profile until the member wants to buy something, but I cannot find a way to pre-populate the new profile when I call the HostedProfilePageRequest.  It makes no sense for my members to have to enter address info I already have on file.

What is the best way to be able to take profile info I already have at my site and fill in those fields when I first create a payment profile for my customers?

[siggimoo]

I ran into a similar problem. My solution was to submit dummy card information (e.g. number 0000000000000000, expires this month). While far from optimal (and yes, rather stupid) it works. Note, however, that the user will see this dummy information when they go to enter the real data. This is not a problem for me as it's an internal only process, and I can train people to expect it.

[TJPride Expert]

Trevor posted this several pages of posts ago:

This behavior is unique to when the customer is on the "Manage Profiles" page.  If you present them with only the "addPayment" page directly, no data will be prepopulated. If you populate a single shipping address and then send the customer to the "manage" page to add their own payment profile, then the shipping address will be prepopulated as the billing address.

Sounds like a solution to what you're trying to do.