Hi All,
We're in the process of making Gift Certificates available to buy online. The difficulty is deciding the best way to send a digital version of the certificates to the customer. Is there a way we can do this the same way that a print at home ticket would be sent? Otherwise I'm looking extracting the ticket template from Tessitura, populating it and sending via our own application. This is perfectly feasible, but don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to.
Currently using V12.5
Thanks
Huw
Huw,
We did something interesting at the Perot that uses a link in the standard confirmation email and a button with a re-direct in the confirmation page that allows the patron to print or email a better looking certificate post purchase. You can look at it here: https://labs.perotmuseum.org/gift-certificate/ We also offer a way for the patron to check thier balance on our main gift certificate page. https://www.perotmuseum.org/visit-the-museum/gift-certificates.html
Hope this helps.
Hi Sadie,
Your certificate site looks great! We're looking at doing something similar at the Hippodrome as our gift voucher process is very manual at the moment. Would you mind sharing some information about the site you used to do this and how it writes back to Tess to validate the certificate code?
My email is sanjayparmar@birminghamhippodrome.com if that's easier. Thanks!
Hi Sanjay,
Sadie is unfortunately no longer at the Perot, but I am the developer who wrote this, and happy to share!
When someone buys a gift certificate(s), we have text in our TNEW confirmation to invite them to create the PDF. If responding to the confirmation email, they will have to enter the code(s) manually, but the confirmation page has script that dynamically edits the links to include the code as a parameter, so the form will autofill with the code.
The PDF generator form and balance check form are written in PHP and use FPDF and FPDI to generate the PDFs from templates our graphic designers made. When a code is entered, the SOAP API is used (GetGiftCertificateInfo) to validate the code and get the balance. The other details (for, from, message, etc) are stored in a little MySQL database, but the balance value is always pulled fresh from the API.
I have been meaning to submit this to the Tess web developer code share after converting it to REST, but if it would be of any use in the meantime, let me know and I can send it to you as-is.
Luke that would be great! We'd love to have more code examples in the repository for the community to pull from. Thanks for being willing to share Perot's work!
Chris
Sure thing Chris! We've got quite a few things like this we'd like to share (for peer review reasons too) but they all need REST conversion first!
Hi Luke,
Thanks for the speedy reply, super helpful!
If you're happy to share your code as is, that would be great