Question

I don’t obviously expect someone to write this for me, but can someone give me a semi-detailed explanation of the files and approach to do something as simple as this???

I have been trying to figure this out for 2 days. The idea here is just that some of our products should create a simple license key on checkout and send that key to a 3rd party system.

This is the task at hand:

1. Add a new table into the database called license_keys with the following fields: customer_id, transaction_id, license_key, and transaction_notes

2. Add a new checkbox when configuring a product called is_licensed_product.

3. If this checkbox=yes then:
   a. during checkout, magento generates a random alphanumeric key in this format ########-######## where # is a capital letter or a number.
   b. this is generated for EACH line item.
   c. this is stored in the licence_keys db table along with the transaction_id, etc.
   d. an API call is made to a remote server: test.com/recieve?key=12345&email={email}&transaction_id={transaction_id}&customer_id={customer_id}&license_key={license_key}
   e. for each lineitem, this API will be called, so that each individual license is sent there.

4. This information should then be visible:
   a. in the admin system
   b. on the receipt sent to the client
   c. on the checkout page

5. a) When the license key is generated, b) when an API call is made, and c) when the API response is received, all of this information should also put into a array and put into the transaction_notes in the db.

Answer 1

There are many, many, many ways to do this. It’s likely that an observer would be useful, perhaps on sales_order_place_after [link], which you could use to do some post-processing.

In your observer, grab the just-placed order object, look for your license-keyed products, generate the keys, do the inserts, possibly reach out to your API or queue it (be careful about handling slow- or non-responding remote system).

For an example of the core using this event to perform some post-processing of sales rule usage, see Mage_SalesRule_Model_Observer::sales_order_afterPlace() [link].