Hey Martin,

By default Merchello looks for the MemberType of "Customer" to associate Umbraco Members with Merchello persisted customers. For your member type you will need to add "store customers" to the Merchello.config (located /App_Plugins/Merchello/Config/) ... find the "customer" element.

If the member signs in, the Merchello Customer object includes a collection of CustomerAddress with a bunch of CRUD extension methods to help you manage the addresses. The CustomerAddress collection has two types (AddressType) that you can manage Billing and Shipping addresses.

In either case, if you are doing a Basket based checkout, you will have access to the SalesPreparation object generally accessed by an extension off of the Basket itself.

Depending on you setup:

// inside a surface controller

var customerContext = new CustomerContext(UmbracoContext)

var customer = customerContext.CurrentCustomer;  // this returns a ICustomerBase and used for either anonymous or known customers

// to access the basket
var basket = customer.Basket();

// to access the SalesPreparation

var salesPreparation = customer.Basket().SalesPreparation();

The sales preparation class has helpful methods allowing you to "prepare a sale" storing billing address, shipping address, shipment rate quotes, prepare invoice for preview, and then finally authorize or authorize and capture payments when some sort of "complete checkout" is finally reached. It also handles, invalidating shipment rate quotes and taxation quotes in the event the customer goes back to shopping and/or manipulates quantities in their basket (which could affect weights, quantities ... etc).

There are several example builds out there - but in the next few days we are consolidating them into the https://github.com/Merchello/Samples public repository so that various programming styles can be checked out in a single place ... just had a meeting about this today, just getting things organized.

In the 1.5.0 release, I've made the change to the IInvoice that adds a setter to the CustomerKey so that after the checkout you will be able to associate an anonymous customer checkout with a customer if they choose to signup for an account after they complete the sale.

We also have some good news, that we are in the design stage of publishing the documentation we have been working on for the last couple of months. We have about 70 documents so far ready to go ... these should be available on http://merchello.com in about a week coinciding with the 1.5.0 release.

We would love to hear your feedback on the process as we are actively looking for ways to make the checkout process more straight forward.

Also, please don't hesitate to enter any issues you have at http://issues.merchello.com.

Thanks!

Rusty

Hi Rusty, finally found some time to get back on to this Merchello project. So when a user is logged in and I look at the ICustomerBase CurrentCustomer object I see that the IsAnonymous value is set to false but the Email, FirstName, LastName, etc properties are blank. I collect these values when a user registers so should I be creating a customer at that point? The LoginName property is correctly set to the email address the user registered with but how do I go about setting the other properties. Also I couldn't see any CRUD methods for adding / editing / deleting addresses, could you give me some code samples around that.

Many thanks, Martin

Hi Martin,

The first name and last name fields on the customer is not something we can automatically set since we can't be 100% certain that the implementation will have a first name and last name on the members content type.

In implementations I've done I added a handler to for the MemberService.Saved event and use whatever property aliases you have in your application.

  public class UmbracoEvents : ApplicationEventHandler
  {
       protected override void ApplicationStarting(UmbracoApplicationBase umbracoApplication, ApplicationContext applicationContext)
       {
           LogHelper.Info<UmbracoEvents>("Binding Merchello Customer synchronization");
           MemberService.Saved += MemberServiceOnSaved;
       }

   protected void MemberServiceOnSaved(IMemberService sender, SaveEventArgs<IMember> saveEventArgs)
    {
        var members = saveEventArgs.SavedEntities.ToArray();

        // Allowed member types for Merchello customers
        var customerMemberTypes = MerchelloConfiguration.Current.CustomerMemberTypes.ToArray();

        // Get a reference to Merchello's customer service
        var customerService = MerchelloContext.Current.Services.CustomerService;

        foreach (var member in members)
        {
            // verify the member is a customer type
            if (!customerMemberTypes.Contains(member.ContentTypeAlias)) continue;

            var customer = customerService.GetByLoginName(member.Username);
            if (customer == null) continue;

            customer.FirstName = member.GetValue<string>("firstName") ?? string.Empty;
            customer.LastName = member.GetValue<string>("lastName") ?? string.Empty;
            customer.Email = member.Username;

            customerService.Save(customer);
        }
    }

  }

Hi Rusty, thanks for that, just what I needed for setting the customer properties but how about saving a billing / shipping IAddress against the customer?

Hi Martin,

The customers actually have their own address - ICustomerAddress so you could use

              var address = [Your IAddress];
              var customerAddress = new CustomerAddress(customer.Key)
                                {
                                    Label = [your label],   // maybe shipping or billing
                                    FullName = Name,
                                    Address1 = address.Address1,
                                    Address2 = address.Address2,
                                    AddressType = AddressType.Shipping,
                                    Locality = address.Locality,
                                    Region = address.Region,
                                    PostalCode = address.PostalCode,
                                    CountryCode = address.CountryCode,
                                    Company = address.Organization,
                                };

               // then save it
               customer.SaveCustomerAddress(customerAddress);

               // I think there is a bug that you may have to work around here to get the address to reindex in the Customer index
               // so you may need to save the customer again.  Not confirmed as I know everything is in the database but I have it
               // as a todo to look at.
               MerchelloContext.Current.Services.CustomerService.Save(customer); 

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