If your community of users has an existing portal, you might want to let them see information about Talent Suite modules and catalogs directly in the portal instead of requiring them to access Talent Suite.

One simple way to do that is to use the Latest Courses gadget, which makes it possible to include information about new courses simply by copying a snippet of HTML markup into the source code of your site.

For those comfortable with a little programming, however, the Talent Suite API offers much more flexibility. In particular, the following API functions would be relevant.

api/catalog

Returns the contents of a catalog.

api/modules

Returns information about a specific module.

api/module

Returns a list of modules matching specific search criteria.

You can find more information on the above API functions by going to Manage > Developer Tools > Talent Suite API in your Talent Suite site.

The following code samples might also be relevant.

• PHP (see in particular catalog.php and module.php)
• JavaServer Pages (JSP)

You can combine the above techniques with the Checkout API to create a custom storefront from which your customers can buy your courses.

Suppose you’re selling courses managed by NetDimensions Learning. Using the Talent Suite API, you could create a custom storefront that would let your customers browse and search for your courses. You could also incorporate a shopping cart so that customers can collect multiple courses that they can purchase in a single transaction.

But what about when it comes time to check out? How do you ensure that Talent Suite handles the payment correctly, and makes the courses available to the customer after the payment is successful?

Starting from 10.1 build 1521, Talent Suite supports the Checkout API, a new, streamlined checkout process for use with custom storefronts. The Checkout API is compatible with all supported payment gateways and plugins.

To use the Checkout API, your shopping cart will need to record an item ID value for each item in the cart. The item ID is available for each module session returned by api/module, e.g.:

<itemId>course1/EKP000000200</itemId>

Once the customer is ready to pay, you can redirect them to servlet/ekp/checkout (relative to the base URL of the site; for example, the full URL might be https://www.example.com/ekp/servlet/ekp/checkout, passing the following query string parameters in the URL.

After percent-encoding the parameter values, the full URL would look as below.

https://www.example.com/ekp/servlet/ekp/checkout?cart=course1%2FEKP000000200+course2%2FEKP000000400&onSuccess=https%3A%2F%2Fstore.example.com%2Fsuccess&onFailure=https%3A%2F%2Fstore.example.com%2Fcancel

Note that both onSuccess and onFailure must, if provided, refer to a trusted app.

Talent Suite will initiate the configured payment process, and make the selected courses available to the customer if payment is successful.

By using the Checkout API together with a payment plugin, you can customize the entire shopping process, from storefront to completion of payment.

We hope this new checkout process provides a smoother experience for your customers, and helps them get to your content faster.