Question

Hi i am creating a windows phone 7.1 application, which requires in app purchases

As WP7 does not have a specific in app purchase SDK like iphone does, can we use paypal for in app purchases,

I am new to windows phone 7 and paypal API

like open a mobile paypal site in browsercontrol when i click on payment button and get the payment done by the user and if the payment success return success message or if fail return failure message.

i do not think Movend is a best option, as we have to maintain products database in their website also which i don’t want.

Answer 1

Here is answer for my question

Paypal does not have specific sdk for WP7, so i tried to solve above the problem in following way

1. Create a website which will take item prices/details in querystring
2. implement ExpressCheckout in that website only. I’ve implemented using paypal Sandbox Web service
3. Place a browser control in the WP7 app and add an event BrowserControl_Navigated for that control
4. Create the Url for for our own website like string.Format("http://localhost:62744/PaymentGateway/ExpressCheckout.aspx?ItemName={0}&Number={1}&Desc={2}&ItemPrice={3}&ItemUrl={4}", ItemName, ItemNumber, ItemDescription, ItemPrice, ItemUrl).Replace(" ", "+");
5. Call the Website in our WP7 app code BrowserControl.Navigate(new Uri(url));
6. After completion of the payment paypal service will redirect the app to a success url which we mentioned otherwise redirect to failure url
7. in the BrowserControl_Navigated event add conditions to check the paypal success and failure urls

8. if the condition success navigate to success page in WP7

   if (BrowserControl.Source.ToString().Contains( "http://localhost:62744/PaymentGateway/Success.html"))
        NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Success.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
   

UPDATE:

Above code will redirect the page to PayPal mobile page, it’s not good as iOS login page in look and feel. We can get PayPal iOS page with a small trick in windows phone 7

By changing the headers(user-agent of client) of the browser will give us the PayPal iPhone page

Like below

  string header = "User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7";

  string url = string.Format("http://10.11.32.211:88/PaymentGateway/ExpressCheckout.aspx?ItemName={0}&Number={1}&Desc={2}&ItemPrice={3}&ItemUrl={4}", ItemName, ItemNumber, ItemDescription, ItemPrice, ItemUrl).Replace(" ", "+");

  BrowserControl.IsScriptEnabled = true;

  BrowserControl.Navigate(new Uri(url),null, header);