question

shoehospital avatar image
shoehospital asked Bryanne Vega commented

Private / unpublished app for my company only

Hi,

I'm new to Clover and still trying to work out the options for creating apps. I'm interested in creating a custom app specific to my company. I'm wondering if this is possible, and what it would take as far as logistics. I understand that there are a fair amount of hoops to jump through to publish a public app, and would rather not have to go through all of that. That being said. I can jump through those hoops if needed, but would still need the app I create to be private and accessible only by my company.

I'm still working out exactly what we would like the custom app to do - it could range from something simple like triggering a webhook, up to completely replacing the register app, so I can't really give specifics on that, just that we'd like to expand upon the base level of what's currently available.

If anyone can give me any insight, I'd appreciate it, thanks!
App Market
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zgreathouse avatar image
zgreathouse Deactivated answered zgreathouse Deactivated converted comment to answer
Thank you for your question!

There is no concept of a private app on the Clover Platform. All apps published to the Clover App Market are accessible to all Clover Merchants (provided their service plan permits it).

Part of the authentication which is necessary for an app to access and use Clover's Rest APIs and SDKs is a check to verify the Merchant has installed the app (from the Clover App Market). To do so otherwise would be against our terms of service.

See Section 2.1 of the Developer Agreement
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shoehospital avatar image
shoehospital answered zgreathouse Deactivated edited
Ok, that's not what I was hoping for. From my understanding of your answer, does that mean that technically I'm not even allowed to use an API key generated from the dashboard to access my own company's data, and instead would need to publish an app the world if I want to access my company's data through the API?

Here's an example of one of the problems I'm trying to solve for my company. Currently, we use old fashioned cash registers, that print out a journal tape. At the end of business every day, we Z-out (close out) the register, which then prints out a receipt with the totals of the day's sales. That day's sales are then considered to be attached to, for example, Z-number 123. Our registers are not closed at a specific time of day; depending on how busy the store is that day, the register may be Z-'d-out and that day's business closed 2 hours before actually closing the shop and the rest of the transactions that day would count as sales for the next day.

We're a shoe repair company, charge upon item pickup; and as part of our closeout process, we need to verify that the price that a repair ticket was written up for is the price that it was actually rung up for, so we essentially add up all of the repair tickets, and check that the total matches what's on the register printout, and reconcile any errors/adjustments. In order to make that happen, I need to have something like the Z-tape printout our current registers give us, that has the daily sales total on it.

I haven't been able to come up with a great way to accomplish this so far and am about to be sitting on more than two dozen mini's I'd like to be able to use as more than just a credit card terminal. The best thing I've been able to come up with is to put a button on our internal tablet system that's basically "i'm closing out the register now", that saves a timestamp of when the button was pressed, and then using the API to pull all of the transactions from between when that button was pressed, and the time it was pressed before that. Terribly hacky way of doing it, and now I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to do that kind of thing with dashboard generated API keys (if not, what is the point of the dashboard generated API keys?)

Please let me know if this is feasible, or any other ideas on how I can make something like this work. As it is right now, it looks like we've ordered more than $15,000 worth of hardware that will wind up doing nothing more than the credit card terminals we already have, so I'm hoping there's some upside to this somewhere.

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Bryanne Vega avatar image
Bryanne Vega answered
@shoehospital

Can you please shoot me a quick email?

bryanne@atomicalsoftwares.com
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chrisb avatar image
chrisb answered Bryanne Vega commented
I too, am finding this road block. I was hired specifically for handling technical work for the business. One of the biggest projects looking to be implemented is an intermediate hook system of sorts to do custom updates to a separate database for their custom web site so that selected products can be added to their ecommerce. To do what's needed, I'd need to make use of the web hooks. I'm not looking to publish an all-out application for the global market though. I simply need to extend the functionality of the system in place. The last thing I want to do is have to recommend a different POS solution entirely, but if I can't extend the system and make it play nice with the web site side of the business, I don't think I'll have any other option.
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Bryanne Vega avatar image Bryanne Vega commented ·

You're welcome to give me a contact as well.

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