Off-site Processing

Off-site processing is the payment mechanism where the customer is redirected to the payment gateways site to complete the transaction and is redirected back to the merchant website on completion.

Since the credit card number and other sensitive details are entered on the payment gateway’s site, the merchant website may not comply to PCI standards. This mode of payment is recommended when the merchant website is not in a position to use SSL certificates, not able to guarantee a secure network etc

Off-site processing is generally implemented in merchant through Integrations (name derived from Active Merchant).

Integration

An Integration much like a Gateway is a Python class. But unlike a Gateway which is used in a view, an Integration renders a form (usually with hidden fields) through a template tag. An integration may also support asynchronous and real-time transaction status handling through callbacks or notifiers like the PayPal IPN

Here is a reference of the attributes and methods of the Integration class:

Attributes

• fields: Dictionary of form fields that have to be rendered in the template.
• test_mode: Signifies if the integration is in a test mode or production. The default value for this is taken from the MERCHANT_TEST_MODE setting attribute.
• display_name: A human readable name that is generally used to tag the errors when the integration is not correctly configured.

Methods

• __init__(options={}): The constructor for the Integration. The options dictionary if present overrides the default items of the fields attribute.
• add_field(key, value): A method to modify the fields attribute.
• add_fields(fields): A method to update the fields attribute with the fields dictionary specified.
• service_url: The URL on the form where the fields data is posted. Overridden by implementations.
• get_urls: A method that returns the urlpatterns for the notifier/ callback. This method is modified by implementations.
• urls: A property that returns the above method.

Helper Function

Very much like Gateways, Integrations have a method of easily referencing the corresponding integration class through the get_integration helper function.

• get_integration(integration_name, *args, **kwargs): Returns the Integration class for the corresponding integration_name.

Example:

>>> from billing import get_integration
>>> get_integration("pay_pal")
<billing.integrations.pay_pal_integration.PayPalIntegration object at 0xa57e12c>