8 days of Windows Phone 8 | Day 8: Wallet and In-App purchases

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Meng Heang

Welcome to the last day in this series of blog posts on the new features for developers of the Windows Phone 8 platform. Today, the 8th day we’ll talk on our last subject of the series, the wallet functionality and how to use in-app purchases.

Day 1: SDK Overview
Day 2: Live tiles and Lock screen
Day 3: Emulator & Simulation dashboard
Day 4: New screen resolutions
Day 5: .net 4.5 & C# 5.0
Day 6: Speech API
Day 7: Proximity capabilities
Day 8: Wallet and In-App purchases

Wallet

The wallet application is meant to be a place on your phone where all kinds of apps can store things like deals or other things for example points you can save at gas stations, bars etc. Using the Wallet API you can add or read wallet items from and to your Wallet application.

The first thing we’ll do in our sample application is add a deal to the Wallet. In this example we’ll build a deal for 1 free beer that can be collected in your favorite bar. Before we start adding code we have to add the Wallet Capability to the WMAppManifest.xml file.

After that we’ll add a button to create a new free beer deal in the wallet to our MainPage.xaml
```
   1: <StackPanel x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
```
```
   2:     <Button x:Name="FreeBeerButton" Content="get 1 free beer deal!" Click="FreeBeerButton_Click_1"></Button>
```
```
   3: </StackPanel>
```
At the click event we’ll add the code to create a new deal in the wallet. We start with creating a new Deal object passing a unique ID to it. on this deal you can set a lot of properties from a name to images and a barcode. In this example i’ve added some of the basic properties but barcodes can be really usefull when you want to be able to use the barcode in your favorite bar for example When we’ve set all the properties we’ll call the SaveAsync method and the Deal will be saved. It’s a common practice to also open the wallet application to let the user know that you’ve saved something to the wallet. There is no special launcher for the Wallet application but you can open an URL starting with wallet:// that will trigger the Wallet to open.
```
   1: private async void FreeBeerButton_Click_1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
```
```
   2: {
```
```
   3:     var beerDeal = new Deal("1FREEBEER");
```
```
   4:     beerDeal.MerchantName = "MyBar";
```
```
   5:     beerDeal.DisplayName = "1 free beer!"; 
```
```
   6:     beerDeal.Description = "collect 1 free beer at your favorite bar";
```
```
   7:     beerDeal.CustomerName = "Geert";
```
```
   8:     
```
```
   9:     beerDeal.ExpirationDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);
```
```
  10:         
```
```
  11:     beerDeal.IssuerName = "Your Favorite Bar";
```
```
  12:     beerDeal.NavigationUri = new Uri("/mainpage.xaml?deal=freebeer", UriKind.Relative);
```
```
  13:  
```
```
  14:     await beerDeal.SaveAsync(); 
```
```
  15:  
```
```
  16:     Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(new Uri("wallet://", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));
```
```
  17:  
```
```
  18: }
```
When we run the app and click the free beer button the wallet will open and our deal is visible. if we click our deal we can see it’s details. if you add a barcode the barcode will be visible here as well. There is also an option to go back to the app. If we would click the open app link the app will open using the NavigationURI property set to the Deal object. You can also mark deals here as used or delete them from your wallet.

Besides deals you can also add Payment Instruments. These objects are things like the points you can gather by shopping at the same store often so you can use these points to get some rewards. Creating a Payment Instrument works almost the same as a deal except then you use the PaymentInstrument object. The PaymentInstrument object also has property to set an amount which you can increase or decrease later.

If you want to use the Payment Instrument items from the wallet you’ll have to add an extra capability to the WMAppManifest.xml called the ID_CAP_WALLET_PAYMENTINSTRUMENTS

The third thing you can add to the Wallet are generic wallet items. this can be like a customer card with a barcode or number which you can use in shops to identify yourself as a returning customer. You can create generic wallet items using the WalletTransactionItem.

In-app purchases

A really important feature of Windows Phone 8 is the possibility to use in-app purchases. In Windows Phone 7 you could only do free apps, trial modes and paid apps. In-app purchases really add new scenario’s to make money. for example you can create a free game where you can buy new levels for a certain amount of money. Another example is a sports app where you can buy push notifications for a certain season instead of buying the game once and getting notifications forever. so how do we do this?

In-app purchases have to be created on the development portal. Log into your developer account at dev.windowsphone.com and upload a new application or go to the details of an existing app.

Click on the products tab and then click “Add in-app product” to create a new product that can be bought in our app.

First we’ll have to fill in the in-app product properties. This consists of a name, and Identifier. this identifier is important because we’ll need to reference this in our app.

you can also select Durable or Consumable as the product type. the difference between this is that durable products will be bought once and will be available forever after that. consumable products are bought once and then also used only once.

We can select a price and press save. after that we’ll also have to add a description for our product

When adding your description you’ll have to add a title, description text and an image. press save again.

Now we’re ready to submit the in-app product. when we press Submit our product will be saved and can be used in our app after certification.

So now we have an in-app product we can try to buy it from within our app.

Let’s add a button again to buy our 30 new levels.
```
   1: <Button x:Name="BuyLevelsButton" Content="buy 30 more levels!" Click="BuyLevelsButton_Click_1" ></Button>
```
At the click event we’ll add code to buy our item. First we’ll need to get a list of all available products for our app. We can get this from the CurrentApp object by calling the LoadListingInformationAsync. since we know there is only 1 product we’ll take a shorcut by selecting the first product but you could select your product by checking the ID here. When we have the product we can call the RequestProductPurchaseAsync method to launch the marketplace and let the user choose if he wants to do this extra purchase. When the user chooses to buy the product or not we go back to our code and check if the product is set to Active. If this is true we’ll have to call the ReportProductFulFillment method to tell the store the app knows the purchase is done and after that we can save a property somewhere that unlocks the new feature in your app.
```
   1: private async void BuyLevelsButton_Click_1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
```
```
   2: {
```
```
   3:     var products = await CurrentApp.LoadListingInformationAsync();
```
```
   4:     var product1 = products.ProductListings.FirstOrDefault();
```
```
   5:     
```
```
   6:     var boughtProduct  = await CurrentApp.RequestProductPurchaseAsync(product1.Value.ProductId, true);
```
```
   7:     
```
```
   8:     if (CurrentApp.LicenseInformation.ProductLicenses[product1.Value.ProductId].IsActive)    
```
```
   9:     {                
```
```
  10:         CurrentApp.ReportProductFulfillment(product1.Value.ProductId);
```
```
  11:         var saveBoughtProductstate = true;
```
```
  12:     }
```
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8 days of Windows Phone 8 | Day 8: Wallet and In-App purchases

Wallet

In-app purchases