cordova-non-renewing-subscription

Simple API for Non-Renewing Subscriptions based on Fovea's Cordova Purchase Plugin

What is that?

Your app only wants 1 type of In-App Purchase: a Non-Renewing Subscription.

You propose only 1 or 2 purchase options? (like 1 month and 1 year).

This extension is probably for you: it'll handle every aspect of the In-App Purchase flow internally and will just let you know if a user is subscribed or not.

It's the easiest way to integrate Non-Renewing Subscriptions on both iOS and Android the world has ever seen!

Getting Started

Setup

Install Cordova's In-App Purchase Plugin. Follow instructions located there on how to setup your app and your in-app products. In particular, create your "non-renewing subscriptions" product on iTunes Connect, your "Managed" products on Google Play.

Download the javascript file cordova-non-renewing-subscription.js, copy it to your www directory and load it from your index.html file. Alternatively (if that suits your workflow), you can retrieve the file from the npm package cordova-non-renewing-subscription.

You should see something like this, preferably right after including cordova.js.

    <script type="text/javascript" src="libs/cordova-non-renewing-subscription.js"></script> 

(change libs to the place where you did put the js file)

Usage

A good starting point to get an idea is the cordova non-renewing subscription demo project.

Here's a commented example integration:

document.addEventListener('deviceready', function() {
 
    // Initialize the non-renewing extension
    // when 'deviceready' has been received.
    // It takes a "products" option, which is
    // an array containing products IDs and duration
    // of the subscription in seconds.
 
    nonRenewing.initialize({
        products: [{
            id: 'cc.fovea.purchase.nonrenewing.1hour',
            duration: 3600
        }, {
            id: 'cc.fovea.purchase.nonrenewing.5minutes',
            duration: 300
        }]
    });
 
 
    // Create some dummy HTML page (for testing).
    // Your content, somewhere, has a "Manage Subscription" button, right?
 
    document.getElementsByClassName('app')[0].innerHTML = '<h1>Demo</h1><p><a href="#" class="manage-subscription">Manage your subscription</a></p>';
 
 
    // Make sure this button opens the subscription manager:
    // nonRenewing.openSubscriptionManager();
 
    var button = document.getElementsByClassName('manage-subscription')[0];
    button.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
        console.log('showMainScreen -> openSubscriptionManager');
        event.preventDefault();
        nonRenewing.openSubscriptionManager();
    });
 
 
    function doSomething() {
 
        // Some places in your code, you probably
        // need to know if the user is subscribed.
 
        nonRenewing.getStatus(function(error, status) {
            if (error) {
                console.error("Failed to load subscription status: " + error);
                return;
            }
            console.log("Is Subscribed: " + status.subscriber);
            console.log("Expiry Date:   " + status.expiryDate);
        });
    };
});

This is the simplest possible example.

Below some raw documentation about the methods we've seen so far:

nonRenewing.initialize(options)

Initialize the In-App Purchase plugins, load subscription status and the in-app products.

Available options:

• products (required). An array of product. Each product has an id and a duration in seconds.
• verbosity. Default to store.INFO. See the cordova purchase plugin for possible value.
• loadExpiryDate. Default to a function that loads from localStorage. See the related section on how to load the subscription status on your server.
• saveExpiryDate. Default to a function that saves to localStorage. See the related section on how to save the subscription status on your server.

nonRenewing.openSubscriptionManager()

Opens a popover that shows the user the current subscription status, and options to renew or extend it.

nonRenewing.getStatus(callback)

Will load the subscription status and return it to you.

The callback takes 2 arguments:

1. an error string (will be null if loading the subscription status succeeded)
2. a status object with the following fields:

• subscriber: true if the user is a subscriber
• expiryDate: human readable date
• expired: true if the user was a subscriber, but the expiry date has passed
• expiryTimestamp: timestamp containing the expiry date (millseconds since 1970)

Connect to a backend server

By default, the subscription status is stored in localStorage. As such, this will only work on a single device. It can be fine if you're building a minimal viable product.

For more advanced uses, it's recommended to store the subscription status on a server.

This extension let you specify methods to load and save the subscription status. Here's an example:

 
// saveExpiryDate is a function that takes as arguments
// the expiryDate (a timestamp) and a callback.
//
// The callback needs to be called when the operation
// succeeds or fails. It takes 1 argument, an error string.
// The error must be null or undefined when the operation succeeds.
 
var saveExpiryDate = function(expiryDate, callback) {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'POST',
        data: { expiryDate: expiryDate },
        url: 'http://somewhere.com/something.php?user_id=12345',
        success: function() {
            callback();
        },
        error: function() {
            callback('An error occurred');
        }
    })
};
 
// loadExpiryDate is a function that takes a callback
// as its only parameter.
//
// The callback needs to be called when the operation
// succeeds or fails. It takes 2 argument, an error string and
// the loaded expiry date value.
//
// The error must be null or undefined when the operation succeeds.
// The expiryDate is ignored when there is an error.
 
var loadExpiryDate = function(callback) {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: 'http://somewhere.com/something.php?user_id=12345',
        success: function(data) {
            callback(null, data.expiryDate);
        },
        error: function() {
            callback('An error occurred');
        }
    })
};
 
// ...
// At initialization, you can override the default saveExpiryDate
// and loadExpiryDate by specifying your own this way:
 
nonRenewing.initialize({
    ... (like before)
    saveExpiryDate: saveExpiryDate,
    loadExpiryDate: loadExpiryDate
});
 

The extension will keep in cache the value for the expiry date, so it's not making requests to the server more than once.

Of course, when subscription are handled on a "per-user" basis and not "per-device", you will want to reset the cached value when user changes.

Handling login/logout events

When an user logs in or out, you will want to reset the expiry date cached by the extension.

To do so, just call nonRenewing.reset();.

Author / Copyright

This code is published under the MIT license.

Developed by Jean-Christophe Hoelt.

Initial development sponsored by interactivetools.com

Copyright 2016, Fovea.cc