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Does anyone with DotNetNuke have experience with downloadable content with a shopping cart?

There is a client using CatalooK as their shopping cart. They sell user manuals for a range of car models (one car has multiple user manuals in different languages) but did some test and this is we found so far:

  • If we have all the downloadable manuals users in the ‘All Users’ role will have access to all the downloadable content by anyone
  • When a user registers (either from the Login page, or through purchasing a product from the cart), a user account is automatically created for them and are assigned the role as ‘Registered Users’. This solves the problem of having all users access to the content – can just change the permission for the downloadable items to only display for 'Registered User' only
  • However, anyone can register themselves on the website and automatically be assigned a ‘Registered Users’ role, therefore getting access to the manuals without having paid for them
  • A step further would be to require the manual adding of user accounts to a new role called ‘Downloads’ which would be the only users within the 'Downloads’ role to have access to the downloadable manuals
  • Problem here is, if a user purchases 1 downloadable item and they are added to the ‘Downloads’ role, they will also be given access to all of the other downloadable manuals – as they are in the same role
  • So I guess the workable solution would be to create a new role for every car model to allow people in each car model role access to the downloads – which would also mean manually adding the role of every group purchased to that user’s accounts.

Anyone have any experience or alternatives to this to make it more automated and secure?

Basically no body has access to the downloads unless you have purchased the products.

casperOne
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user723217
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2 Answers2

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Upon purchasing some shopping carts send you an email with a unique link to the downloadable so they can access it that way. In your situation you also want them to be able to see the documents on the site at anytime after purchasing them, which makes sense.

Catalook has a 'Your Orders' module, does that show you the document or electronic item you purchased? That might be an option.

But worst case, I guess you can implement your 1 role per product. Sounds like a lot of work though! Or, do some custom :]coding.

Based on your situation the cart I use the most DNNspot (mine) - it would be similar to Catalook. Where you would need to create a role per product. Or use the orders module to show your previous orders which would link to your document you bought.

How good is your SQL? You could use the core DNN 'reports module' If you analyze the database and orders table - with a little bit of SQL you could setup a custom Report and maybe solve this.

Ryan Doom
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This is very interesting an challenging. probably, this is not supported by catalook store module by default. If you are looking to implement a new simple module, there are some simple solutions to this.

  1. Using personalization: you can use dnn's personalization provider to store user products. initially empty, and as user purchases the products, you can add comma separated list of productid to maintain it smartly. check that values back to validate downloads

  2. Using custom user profile property and use it in same way as [1] above

Email option suggested by @Ryan is good option when you want to allow users to download manually only via email links. But again, you will still need to validate if a user is allowed to download that product or not that you can achieve via the above suggestions.

Let me know if you need more help with this, I have good experience to deal with catalook specific small modules for such extensions.

Happy coding

Prashant Lakhlani
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