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Detecting if the MS Wallet is supported
Many developers are chosing to use the Microsoft Wallet for securely taking customer credit card / payment
information for their e-commerce site. The MS Wallet is implemented as a client-side
ActiveX control. This means that in order for your customers to purchase using the
MS Wallet, their browser needs to support ActiveX controls.
Unfortunately not all browsers have this ability, including several popular browsers
such those from Netscape and Opera (not even in the latest versions). Therefore if
you are implementing the MS Wallet in your site, you'll want to make sure to provide an
alternative form of secure payment for those visitors without support for this component.
Microsoft provides useful scripts for implementing the Wallet in your ASP code.
Unfortunately their scripts rely on the MS browser capability component, which frequently
misidentifies browsers and ActiveX support in particular. Therefore relying on the
MS component for this information will result in situations where you send the Wallet to
those who can not handle it, and several cases where you do not send it to users
when you should have..
To work around this problem, simply search through the MS scripts related to the Wallet
and change all occurances of the class string "MSWC.BrowserType" in the
CreateObject statements in the scripts to "cyScape.browserObj". This will
ensure that you accurately identify which users can support the Wallet and provide
alternatives for those who can not.
For simple demonstration purposes, the following code snippet is provided. For
real-world uses of this technique start with the scripts available for MS Wallet and
change the class string as instructed above.
filename=/browserhawk/walletcheck.asp
<html>
<head>
<title>Purchase</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Payment info:<br>
<%
set bh = Server.CreateObject("cyScape.browserObj")
if bh.ActiveXControls then
response.write "... send MS Wallet control"
else
response.write "... send alternative code for collecting payment info"
end if
%></p>
<p>%></p>
</body>
</html>
Need a copy of BrowserHawk? See our section on Getting Started.
Copyright (c) 1999 cyScape, Inc.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, distributed, or reprinted
without written consent from cyScape.
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