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A Loyalty Pass Journey

Today's post is going to serve as a bit of a journal, the pitfalls and triumphs I'm facing as I achieve a smooth user experience in the world of creating digital loyalty cards.  The main player I'm working with on this is with Airship (formally Urban Airship).  Their support has been fairly good, I personally had the most trouble in linking the template with Google Pay.  The best piece of advice I can give is, do not start creating the template until you have got the Merchant Centre all ready to go.

This is all going rather well at the moment, including using the Adaptive Link APIs which provides a simple query string approach which will redirect the request to either the iOS or Android pass depending on their device.  Ultimately though I would like to eventually call the Google and Apple API's directly so this has been a side project.

I'm starting with Google, and the main piece of documentation starts here. Straight away there is a missing, or at least missing from linked to this snippet they provide on how the classes
Google_Service_Walletobjects_* is defined.  Be sure to download this snippet and included in your project.

Next, there is nothing to say how they defined $assertObj in this snippet either, which is cruicial to produce the JWT of the created pass.  It took a few attempts to get through to their support that this was an outdated function library, and it was best to use this one.  Thankfully the rest was much like setting up any other kind of Google Cloud set up.  Here's how it goes.

Go ahead and create the service account that is going to be used with the Merchant Centre, and then enable the "Google Pay Passes API" service.  Be sure to get the copy of the service account JSON, you will need that.  Once this is all done, go in to the Merchant Centre and share the account with the service account email created by this process.

The Construct

Here is the general flow:


As you can see we have included the two missing scripts that we need to do the wallet objects and encryption.  That reminds me, you may also need to update your composer with these two packages:
This will certainly go hand in hand with the JWT encoding you'll need to do.  The documentation from Google isn't too bad from here, and I could write a hell of a lot covering every option.  Have a play, main thing to understand is that the classes are a collection of their respective objects.

One last thing, how they would advise you to use the encryption, unlike what is documented here, is I did something like the following:

Before you ask, the gpgp is defined in the construct above, and the _makeClass and _makeObject is part of my own definition.  I had also modified the construct of the GpapJwt to suit my way of incorporating the _jsonAuth from my own construct.

I really hope this helps! The encryption especially took days out of my life of searching and waiting for feedback from their support, let alone on how I can find the scripts necessary to create these classes.

Cheers!

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