TrustCommerce Subscription plugin released
This plugin provides a simple interface to create, edit, delete, and query subscriptions using the TrustCommerce Citadel API. This is most useful if you have an application that needs to bill on a monthly or quarterly basis and would like to avoid the liability of storing customer credit card information and the hassle of being CISP compliant.
Note: This plugin is being used in production at Service Sidekick.
TrustCommerce Subscription plugin
TrustCommerce is a payment gateway providing credit card processing and subscription/recurring billing services.
TrustCommerce implements recurring billing through a service named Citadel.
This plugin provides a simple interface to create, edit, delete, and query subscriptions using the TrustCommerce Citadel API.
Setup
Install the plugin.
./script/plugin install http://svn.depixelate.com/plugins/trustcommerce_subscriptionContact TrustCommerce and request a Citadel-enabled test account.
Setup your TrustCommerce credentials in environment.rb.
TrustCommerceGateway::ACCOUNT_SETTINGS = { :custid => 'your_customer_id', :password => 'your_password' }(optional) Install the TCLink ruby extension.
It is highly recommended to download and install the extension as it provides fail-over capability and enhanced security features. If this library is not installed, the plugin will fall back to standard POST over SSL.
(optional) Run the tests (see testing section below).
- You're ready to go! See usage section on ideas on integrating with your app.
Testing
Important! You must have a TrustCommerce account setup with Citadel support before running these tests!
You can set the appropriate environment variables from the command line and run the tests like this:
export TC_USERNAME=username TC_PASSWORD=password
ruby vendor/plugins/trustcommerce_subscription/test/trustcommerce_subscription_test.rb
Note: Use 'set' command on windows in place of export
About Citadel
Merchants create a billing profile through Citadel including customer information, credit card data, and billing frequency. Citadel stores the information and issues the merchant a Billing ID. A Billing ID is a six-character alphanumeric string identifying the customer profile.
Merchants can modify the customer's information, credit card data, or billing frequency anytime using the issued Billing ID.
Usage
Create a $12.00 monthly subscription for Jennifer Smith
response = TrustCommerceGateway::Subscription.create(
:cc => '4111111111111111',
:exp => '0412',
:name => 'Jennifer Smith',
:amount => 1200,
:cycle => '1m',
:demo => 'y'
)
if response['status'] == 'approved'
puts "Customer profile created with Billing ID: #{response['billingid']}"
else
puts "An error occurred: #{response['error']}"
end
Modify subscription with a new credit card
response = TrustCommerceGateway::Subscription.update(
:billingid => 'ABC123',
:cc => '5411111111111115',
:exp => '0412'
)
if response['status'] == 'accepted'
puts "Customer profile updated"
else
puts "An error occurred: #{response['error']}"
end
Cancel subscription
response = TrustCommerceGateway::Subscription.destroy(
:billingid => 'ABC123'
)
if response['status'] == 'accepted'
puts 'Customer profile removed from active use'
else
puts 'An error occurred'
end
Fetch all transactions for a customer in CSV format
response = TrustCommerceGateway::Subscription.query(
:querytype => 'transaction',
:action => 'sale',
:billingid => 'ABC123'
)


6 Comments
Thanks for the plugin. Can you tell me how it differs from ActiveMerchant's TrustCommerce support?
ActiveMerchant is a fantastic library for processing one-time payments through various gateways. This plugin targets managing customer profiles and billing monthly, quarterly, etc.
If you are building a store that sells gadgets and you simply want to process a sale, ActiveMerchant should work perfectly.
If you want to store the customer's personal and credit card information from the sale and don't want to take responsibility for storing this info on your servers, you can use TrustCommerce's Citadel system and this plugin.
Where this plugin really shines is when you have a web app with a subscription-based business model.
Hope this helps.
This looks really nice. So this will work without the TC ruby bindings installed? I develop on windows for the time being and having to compile C code to work with TC through ruby was keeping me from using their services.
Matthew - It should work fine on windows as it falls back to https if the TC ruby libs are not installed. Assuming that the windows ruby disto ships with the standard net/http and net/https libs and openssl, it should work fine.
I'd recommend that you run the tests and see what happens. Let me know how it goes.
Hello Zack, I recently came across your plugin while looking for viable Rails payment code. I think my situation falls in between what you've done and Active Merchant; I'd like to perform non-scheduled recurring charges against a customer's card but have the card info stored in Citadel. This will require me to add code to Active Merchant (which I'm comfortable doing) to allow billing by citadel ID, but it looks like it would be about the same amount of effort to add one-time charge capability to your plugin.
Jim - Check out the latest version of the plugin. It can handle one-time charges and credits now. Check out the test suite for examples. Hope this works for you.
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