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Displaying Transaction Id to the customers view

I've been making an eCommerce laravel system and I've been struggling with showing the customers their transactions Id after they've completed all their payment. I'm using an API to carry out the transaction. After the user has successfully carried out the payment, the transaction Id is then saved to the database. Now, I want to take the transaction id, and display it on the customers view so that they can print an invoice. Here's the controller that's supposed to be handling all the transaction Id:
public function confirmPayment(Request $request){
$request->validate(['transactionId'=>'required']);
$transId = $request->transactionId;
$exists = Payment::where('mpesa_trans_id',$transId)->latest()->first();
if(!$exists){
$error= ["success"=>false, "error"=>"Unable to confirm your transaction code. Please contact admin.. :)"];
session($error);
return back();
}
$message = ["success"=>true, "message"=>"Payment successful!"];
session($message);
return back();
}
Here's how I've tried to display the transaction id on the customers view
<div class="frm-grp">
<label>#lang('Transaction Id')</label>
<input type="text" name="transactionId" placeholder="#lang('Example: OIB9FQP9H7')">
<span class="text-box">Your Transaction Id Is</span>
<span>{{$transId->transactionId}}</span>
</div>
Which also gives me an error 'Undefined variable: transId'. I didn't put the #foreach yet.
Can someone please assist me on figuring out the solution to this problem? This is where the transaction id is supposed to be displayed after the customer makes a payment.

The variables declared in the controller are not automatically available to the view especially as you're doing a redirect.
To pass variables to a view in laravel you need to include them in the second parameter of the view function:
return view('transaction.show', ['transId' => $transId]);
You're redirecting to the previous route however so you can't do that.
Instead you need to make that variable available in some other way.
The previous request data should be available using the old method which I think would work in your case:
<span>{{ old('transId') }}</span>

Best approach/design to web application?

I have been taking a Node.js course on Udemy and would like to apply some of the knowledge I have gained to create a simple web application. I would like to have a user register, which leads him to an admin panel, this part I already have.
This user (requester) can then refer users (invitees) to this website using a unique link. For example he would click a button to generate a unique hyperlink (my idea for this link was to be the http://websiteurl/userid of the requester who is sending the link).
The requester can then send this link through email to their friends to invite them to the website, once they click the link they are taken to a sign up form and when they fill in the form they are linked (added to an array under the original user).
How would I go about setting up this "session", as in make sure that the form that the invitees fill out is linked to the original requester? How can those forms be generated dynamically on the requester's hyperlink?
I'm not looking for the exact code to do this, but rather validation if my idea for the url is a good approach or if there are other approaches I should consider.
Thanks in advance!

Well, this would require you changing the schema for your database. A user will need to have a property like:
{
referred: []
}
The referred array should contain ids or some sort of reference to a user's referred users.
On the "/:userid" route, the form should submit to the route where a new user is created and have a parameter with the user ID. In this case, I am using query parameters.
So if a person were to visit /foo, they would get a form that would post to a URL like /new?userid=foo.
In that route, you can do something like this (assuming Express):
app.post("/new", (req, res) => {
const userID = req.query.userid;
const newUser = // create user normally
if(userID) {
// `userID` referred this user
const referrer = getUser(userID);
referrer.referred.push(newUser);
save(referrer);
}
});
The getUser function should returning the current user, and you should modify the referred property with the new user. This code was merely an outline and you should update the user in your database.
In a nutshell, a form should post to /new?userid=foo, and when creating a new user, if this parameter is present, you can update the database entry for the user id in the parameter with the id of the new user.

Meteor.js - Fetch/Get Enrollment token (from Accounts.sendEnrollmentEmail)

I can't figure out how to get the enrollment token from the Accounts.sendEnrollmentEmail function.
I know this function sends a direct mail towards the user which in the end looks something like this:
http://localhost:3000/#/enroll-account/FCXzBbqHInZgBlLaOpu8Iv11jP9DJEG-e1auAHDsh6S
However, I would need to somehow get only to the token part FCXzBbqHInZgBlLaOpu8Iv11jP9DJEG-e1auAHDsh6S as I want to send enrollment mail trough a different service (e.g Postmark)
How to do this?

The Accounts.sendEnrollmentEmail(userId, email) function generates a random token and saves it in the user's services.password.reset.token field.
The code that generates the token is:
var token = Random.secret();
var when = new Date();
var tokenRecord = {
token: token,
email: email,
when: when
};
Meteor.users.update(userId, {$set: {
"services.password.reset": tokenRecord
}});
(You can view the function's source code here).
It then sends an email to the user using the Email package. If you want to use a different service to send the email, you basically have 2 options:
Use the same convention yourself (i.e, create the same record and use your own email service in your own function).
Use the existing function, allow the mail delivery to fail silently and then query the user's document for the token and send the email yourself.
Neither is a particularly good option, but both will work for the time being. I wish they had refactored this part into its own function.
Note that the accounts packages are expected to undergo some changes towards the release of the next Meteor versions.
BTW, this function is very similar to Accounts.sendResetPasswordEmail, which you may also wish to override or create your own version.

firebase javascript injection

I want ask something about firebase security. How to handle following situations?
User is creating account with createUserWithEmailAndPassword() function, then i save his username,email,created_at...to realtime db. But what if data are not saved correctly. His account is created and he is logged in automatically but data is not stored.
I have some registration logic... for example unique usernames... so before creating acc i check if this username exist in realtime db. But he still can call createUserWithEmailandPassword() from js console and account is created.

For situation one:
According to the firebase docs (https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/api/firebase/createuser.html), creating a user does not automatically authenticate them. An additional call to authWithPassword() is required first. In order to ensure that a user isn't authenticated without valid data, you could run a check to the server to make sure the data is saved correctly before authenticating.
Edit: Nevermind that; looks like firebase does auto-auth now - take a look at what I wrote below.
Now a concern with this approach would be if your app allowed people to authenticate with an OAuth provider like gmail, then there is no function for creating the user before authenticating them. What you may need to do is pull the user data from the firebase, determine if it's valid, and if its not valid show a popup or redirect that lets the user fix any invalid data.
For situation two:
If you wanted to make sure that in the case of them calling createUserWithEmailAndPassword() from the console a new user is not created, you could try something like this with promises;
var createUserWithEmailAndPassword = function(username, password) {
var promise = isNewUserValid(username, password);
promise.then(function() {
// Code for creating new user goes here
});
}
In this way, you never expose the actual code that makes a new user because it exists within an anonymous function.
I don't think that this could solve the problem entirely though because firebases API would let anyone create an account using something
var ref = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com");
ref.createUser({
email: "bobtony#firebase.com",
password: "correcthorsebatterystaple"
}
(Taken from https://www.firebase.com/docs/web/api/firebase/createuser.html)
If you wanted to make sure that server side you can't ever create a user with the same user name, you'd need to look into firebases's rules, specifically .validate
Using it, you could make sure that the username doesn't already exist in order to validate the operation of creating a username for an account.
Here's the firebase doc on rules: https://www.firebase.com/docs/security/quickstart.html
And this is another question on stack overflow that is quite similar to yours. Enforcing unique usernames with Firebase simplelogin Marein's answer is a good starting point for implementing the server side validation.

First save the user credentials in the realtime database before you create the user:
var rootRef = firebase.database().ref('child');
var newUser = {
[name]: username,
[email]: useremail,
[joined]: date
};
rootRef.update(newUser);
After adding the Usersinfo into the realtime database create a new user:
firebase.auth().createUserWithEmailAndPassword(useremail, userpassword).catch(function(error) {
// Handle Errors here.
var errorCode = error.code;
var errorMessage = error.message;
// ...
});
When an error occured while inserting the data in the realtime database, it will skip the createuser function.
This works fine for me, hope this helps!

Automatically assign a customer to a specific customer group on sign-up - Bigcommerce

I've been told by BC support that this isn't possible, but I would be surprised if there really wasn't a way.
I need to be able to automatically assign a customer to a specific customer group when they create an account. My thought:
I would add an extra field to the sign-up form
Provide a user with a code (a string or number)
User enters code when creating new account
User hits submit
On form submit I would grab the value of the extra field:
var codeInput = document.getElementById('code-input').value;
I would then compare that value to a pre-defined string, and if there is a match, I would assign that customer to groupX (with a group id of 8):
if ( codeInput === "codeIGaveToTheUser" ) {
currentUserGroupID = 8;
}
Is it possible to assign a customer to a specific group on sign-up like this (or any other way)?
Any help is much appreciated.

Although using BigCommerce webhooks would ensure the highest success rate of executing your customer group assignment app, it requires quite a bit of setup on BigCommerce (creating a draft app, getting an oAuth key, jumping jacks, etc), and may be a bit of overkill for your requirements.
Here's an easier way, in my {mostly} humble opinion, that takes advantage of much of what you included in your original question. Any solution though will nonetheless require an external server to handle the customer group assignment through the BigCommerce API.
Within the BigCommerce control panel, add in the extra field to the user sign up form like you mentioned.
So as you can see, this new input field has been added natively to the default registration page:
So now, when a user creates an account on your site, the value for the Signup Code (the custom field created) will be directly accessible through the API for that customer's account. Take a look at what that JSON data looks like:
Okay, so this is nice and all, but how do we automate it?
To do so, we will have to let our external application know that a customer just registered. Furthermore, our external application will need some sort of reference to this newly created customer, so that it knows which customer to update the customer group for. Normally a BigCommerce webhook would notify us of all this, but since we aren't using a BigCommerce webhook, here's the alternative method to triggering the external script.
We will trigger our external application via the BigCommerce Registration Confirmation page - createaccount_thanks.html. This page is loaded immediately after a customer creates an account, so it is the perfect place to insert our trigger script.
Additionally, now that the customer is logged in, we can access the customer's email address via a BigCommerce Global system variable -%%GLOBAL_CurrentCustomerEmail%%.
We should make an HTTP request from this page to our external application along with the customer's email address. Specifically, we can make an XMLHttpRequest via JavaScript, or to be modern, we'll use Ajax via jQuery. This script should be inserted before the closing </body> tag on createaccount_thanks.html.
Example of POST request (although a GET would suffice as well):
<script>
$(function() {
$('.TitleHeading').text('One moment, we are finalizing your account. Please wait.').next().hide(); // Let the customer know they should wait a second before leaving this page.
//** Configure and Execute the HTTP POST Request! **//
$.ajax({
url: 'the_url_to_your_script.com/script.php',
type: 'POST',
contentType: 'application/json',
data: JSON.stringify({email:"%%GLOBAL_CurrentCustomerEmail%%"}),
success: function() {
// If the customer group assignment goes well, display page and proceed normally. This callback is only called if your script returns a 200 status code.
$('.TitleHeading').text('%%LNG_CreateAccountThanks%%').next().show();
},
error: function() {
// If the customer group assignment failed, you might want to tell your customer to contact you. This callback is called if your script returns any status except 200.
$('.TitleHeading').text('There was a problem creating your account').after('Please contact us at +1-123-456-7890 so that we can look into the matter. Please feel free to continue shopping in the meantime.');
}
});
});
</script>
Now finally, you just need to create your serverside application responsible for handling the request above, and updating the customer's customer group. You can use any language that you desire, and BigCommerce even offers several SDK's you can use to save mega development time. Just remember that you need to host it somewhere online, and then insert its URL to the JS script above.
PHP Example (quick & dirty):
git clone https://github.com/bigcommerce/bigcommerce-api-php.git
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php && php composer.phar install
<?php
/**
* StackOverflow/BigCommerce :: Set Customer Group Example
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37201106/
*
* Automatically assigning a customer group.
*/
//--------------MAIN------------------------//
// Load Dependencies:
require ('bigcommerce-api-php/vendor/autoload.php');
use Bigcommerce\Api\Client as bc;
// Define BigCommerce API Credentials:
define('BC_PATH', 'https://store-abc123.mybigcommerce.com');
define('BC_USER', 'user');
define('BC_PASS', 'token');
// Load & Parse the Email From the Request Body;
$email = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'))->email;
// Execute Script if API Connection Good & Email Set:
if ($email && setConnection()) {
$customer = bc::getCollection('/customers?email=' .$email)[0]; //Load customer by email
$cgid = determineCustomerGroup($customer->form_fields[0]->value); //Determine the relevant customer group ID, via your own set string comparisons.
bc::updateCustomer($customer->id, array('customer_group_id' => $cgid)) ? http_send_status(200) : http_send_status(500); //Update the customer group.
} else {
http_send_status(500);
exit;
}
//-------------------------------------------------//
/**
* Sets & tests the API connection.
* #return bool true if the connection successful.
*/
function setConnection() {
try {
bc::configure(array(
'store_url' => BC_PATH,
'username' => BC_USER,
'api_key' => BC_PASS
));
} catch (Exception $e) {
return false;
}
return bc::getResource('/time') ? true : false; //Test Connection
}
/**
* Hard define the customer group & signup code associations here.
* #param string The code user used at signup.
* #return int The associated customergroup ID.
*/
function determineCustomerGroup($signupCode) {
switch ($signupCode) {
case 'test123':
return 1;
case 'codeIGaveToTheUser':
return 8;
default:
return 0;
}
}
So then you would do your customer group string comparisons directly in the serverside program. I'd recommend you rewrite your own BC API script as the one above in quality is really something along the lines of functional pseudo-code, but more so present to show the general idea. HTH

You would need to set up a server to listen for webhooks unless you wanted to do a cron job. We have some basic information on the developer portal, but I included more resources below. From there, you'd need to choose your server language of choice to listen for the webhooks once they been created, respond correctly (200 response if received), execute code based on this information, and then take action against the BC API.
So if you were looking for a code, you'd need to listen for the store/customer/created webhook, and have your code look for a custom field that contained the code. If it was present, then take action. Else, do nothing.
https://developer.github.com/webhooks/configuring/
http://coconut.co/how-to-create-webhooks
How do I receive Github Webhooks in Python