Question

I’m adding multi-currency support to an e-commerce application. The way I approached the problem was to keep the application in it’s base currency and have the template call a priceDisplay() function/plugin anytime it displays a price. So the template continues to receive prices in dollar amounts. The priceDisplay function correctly converts the price if needed and adds the correct $ or Euro sign depending on the viewers settings, stored in the session. On order submit, the application will store the order in dollar amount as well as the currencyCode and currencyRate. Additionally we will charge the customer’s credit card in their currency to ensure they get billed exactly what was shown on the order screen.

Now the issue I am having is when displaying the cart totals in the cart as well as during checkout. As an example, the application sends the template the prices to display in the shopping cart:

subtotal: 9.75
ship: 5.95
total: 15.70

The template takes these amounts and calls the priceDisplay function on each item. If the currency rate is 1.1, then we get displayed to the user:

subtotal: 10.725 -> 10.73
ship: 6.545 -> 6.55
total: 17.27

You can see that the subtotal + ship = 17.28, but the total converted is 17.27.

So couple of options I think could work, though not thought all the way through:

1. Handle all conversion on the application side
2. Where items will be totaled, the template should send all the individual addends and total together in the base currency to the priceDisplay function, which will convert them and ensure that the converted total and sum of addends match up. In this case, then how do I communicate to the application that the total is not 15.70 but perhaps 15.71 or 15.69 (since we will be storing the order in base currency and multiply by the exchangeRate when processing the payment.)
3. Keep track of dropped/added decimal points as part of the conversions and do something ‘smart’ with that. So in this example, 10.725, we added 5 thousandths. So when we convert 6.545, we should first drop .005 then convert. Perhaps this is the process that option 2 above does?
4. Your suggestion here.

If it makes any difference, application is in PHP and template is Smarty.

You can also see the same issue in adding the line totals of the cart items:
3 items x 9.75 each = 29.25
converted:
3 items x 10.73 (10.725) = 32.18 (32.175)
but 3 x 10.73 = 32.19 != 32.18

Answer 1

I’m firmly in the 1 camp. Currency conversion is core business logic, and belongs in your models, not your views.

Further, although money looks like floating-point numbers, it isn’t. Money changes hands in integer quantities of whatever your base unit is. In the US, for example, If gumballs are 10 cents each and I buy ten, then I’m trading 100 pennies for 10 gumballs. Even if I give a dollar bill, from a software perspective, it’s best to count that as 100 pennies.

For more on this, see Martin Fowler’s “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” and “Analysis Patterns”. He talks through all the issues in detail and gives good sample code. You can also find some of that info on the web:

• Quantity (with some money sample code)
• Money (mainly a pointer into his book)

If you need the accounting to work, I’d also talk to the accountant. Currency conversion is often complicated by changing rates, weird fees, and other nonsense, and you can spend a long time chasing pennies to make the books balance if you don’t get it right from the get-go.