Selling gift certificates on line

Hi Lindsey,

I'd like to get more info on this also.  Did you find good docs on this?

I am in the process of reworking this part of our website.  What exists on our site now is something that I am told was slammed together in a hurry.  It creates the gift certificate within an anonymous account that is specially designated to hold gift certificates.  Even if a constituent is authenticated on the web, the gift cert still goes to this anonymous account.  It creates a very ugly manual process for our customer service dept.  They have to run reports and look at manually-entered names & addresses to search for constituents or create new constituents to transfer money into.  Also, the process has an acounting "hole" wherein the amount of the gift certificate can be arbitrarily assigned with no accounting restriction/safeguard in place to ensure the amount transferred within the GL is the amount assigned to the gift certificate value.  This Can't Be Right!

Also, the internal management of the Cart and Order objects seems very convoluted as each Page_Load within the aspx causes each of these objects to be cleared and recreated every page cycle.  My gut tells me this isn't right (it's never been the right way on any other asp.net site I've built), but I'm still getting familiar with the correct way to handle tessitura sessions, carts, orders, etc.  I have not been able to get a good feel on the whole "lifecycle" of those objects, when they are cleared, how they are related, etc, from the docs.  When looking at our existing code, I do not have confidence in the techniques I am seeing regarding these Tessitura objects because I see other non-tessitura related coding techniques in this project that are also sub-optimal within the context of generally-accepted "best practice" asp.net coding techniques.

Is there a "best practice" for this process?  Also, any direction on the best docs to review on this?

Thanks!

Hi Lindsey,

I'd like to get more info on this also.  Did you find good docs on this?

I am in the process of reworking this part of our website.  What exists on our site now is something that I am told was slammed together in a hurry.  It creates the gift certificate within an anonymous account that is specially designated to hold gift certificates.  Even if a constituent is authenticated on the web, the gift cert still goes to this anonymous account.  It creates a very ugly manual process for our customer service dept.  They have to run reports and look at manually-entered names & addresses to search for constituents or create new constituents to transfer money into.  Also, the process has an acounting "hole" wherein the amount of the gift certificate can be arbitrarily assigned with no accounting restriction/safeguard in place to ensure the amount transferred within the GL is the amount assigned to the gift certificate value.  This Can't Be Right!

Also, the internal management of the Cart and Order objects seems very convoluted as each Page_Load within the aspx causes each of these objects to be cleared and recreated every page cycle.  My gut tells me this isn't right (it's never been the right way on any other asp.net site I've built), but I'm still getting familiar with the correct way to handle tessitura sessions, carts, orders, etc.  I have not been able to get a good feel on the whole "lifecycle" of those objects, when they are cleared, how they are related, etc, from the docs.  When looking at our existing code, I do not have confidence in the techniques I am seeing regarding these Tessitura objects because I see other non-tessitura related coding techniques in this project that are also sub-optimal within the context of generally-accepted "best practice" asp.net coding techniques.

Is there a "best practice" for this process?  Also, any direction on the best docs to review on this?

Thanks!