Phoca Forum

Hi

There is a site that sells digital products. The file is uploaded to the product, and it works. But I want to add a twist.

When a customer orders a product and downloads it, I need to provide them a personalized copy of the original file. Essentially, this means modifying the original "master" version of the file by embedding some digital data, metadata, etc. The customer then receives this personalized copy instead of the original one.

I was wondering if it’s possible to achieve this using Phoca Cart.

I have experience with Joomla plugin development, so I was considering whether I could generate the file on-the-fly during the download process by triggering a plugin method. Alternatively, could we create the personalized copy during the order process and provide that version for download?

What do you think? Would this be possible using Phoca Cart?

Hi, for now, there is no such option, so yes, this needs to be customized.

The flow can be following, when ordering, the filename will be get from filesystem - somehow changed (there can be many different ways) and stored to same or other folder, then the paths stored in order tables needs to be changed too.

If such or similar way will be used, then there is even other possible problem, what to do with so many files on the server, etc. etc.

Jan

I solved it using a system plugin. In the onAfterInitialise method, I intercept the PhocaCart download.download task and created a local modification of the original download script.
Here's how it works:

- I retrieve the file path stored in the library's $absOrRelFile variable and pass it to a custom plugin method.
- In this method, I read the file, modify it dynamically, and save it as a temporary file.
- I then return the temporary file's path for download, and once the download is complete, the file is deleted.

This approach eliminates the need to store multiple versions of the file. By using the order_token and download_token, I can accurately determine how to personalize the document at the time of download.

Hi, great to hear it, thank you for the info.

Jan