Request a sandbox
A sandbox site is your own iVendNext shop, hosted by us and full of made-up demo data. It is where you build and test before you touch a customer's site. It is for anyone who builds for an iVendNext customer: an outside partner or a customer's own IT team.
Your site's address looks like yourcompany.sandbox.ivend.co. We tell you the address when the site is ready.
How to ask
Fill in the sandbox request form on GitHub. It needs a GitHub account. It asks for a short name for your company or team (it becomes the first part of your address), what you plan to build, and a work address for us to reach you at.
The form is public. Anyone can read it. Give a shared mailbox such as partners@yourcompany, not a personal address, and never put a key, a password or a customer's name in it.
What you receive
- An address — your own site, in your name. We tell you the address when the site is ready.
- An administrator login for that site, with a one-time password. You choose your own password the first time you sign in.
- Logins for the shop's people: a store manager and two cashiers, each with a till sign-in ID, a password and a six-digit PIN.
Nothing else. You never receive the software, a server, a container or a connection to the database. Your own code runs on your own machine or server and talks to your site over HTTPS, exactly as it will talk to a customer's site.
Every sandbox site is its own database, so no builder sees or touches another's.
What is on your site
| Part | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Company | Demo Retail — a US shop: US dollars, prices exclude sales tax, and 8% is added at checkout |
| Stores | Demo Retail — Store 1, Store 2, Store 3. Each has its own stock and one till profile, which serves the phone, the counter till and the tablet alike |
| Tills | two per store, six in all, free to claim by a till or a phone |
| Catalogue | phones, tablets and laptops in several colours and sizes, plus earbuds, chargers, cases, cables and a care plan (a service). Every stocked item has a barcode and a price |
| Price list | Demo Retail Price List |
| Promotion | DEMO-10-OFF — 10% off the sale, in every store, switched on |
| Customers | a walk-in customer, a repeat customer and a VIP customer, with a loyalty programme |
| Gift cards | a gift card and a store credit, each with a balance |
| History | two past purchases by the VIP customer, so returns and reports have something to read |
| Extension points | every one present and switched off; nothing of ours is installed beyond the product itself |
The people on your site, and what each may do:
| Who | Sign-in (Desk) · till ID | Roles it is given | What for |
|---|---|---|---|
| You, the administrator | admin@demo-retail.example |
System Manager, Item Manager, Sales Master Manager, Stock User, Retail Manager | set up the shop as a customer's administrator does: items, prices and price lists, promotions, pricing rules, coupons, till profiles, POS Studio, receipts, workflows, reports, roles, users and keys; read the sales made at the till |
| Store manager | manager@demo-retail.example · manager |
Retail Manager | a manager's work at the till: approvals, returns, closing the day |
| Cashier 1 and Cashier 2 | cashier1@demo-retail.example · cashier1, cashier2@demo-retail.example · cashier2 |
Retail Cashier | selling at the till, in any of the three stores |
| Integration user | integration@demo-retail.example |
Demo Integration — starts with one right: read items | your first connected app. It has no password and no key yet: you make its key (below) |
The e-mail addresses are made up. The site also gives every user its standard roles, and gives the administrator the right to edit the shared Desk workspaces. Each role in the table is there because the administrator needs it for at least one of the jobs listed, and together they cover all of them; our own check before hand-over proves both.
The limits
- Developer mode is off, as on a customer's site. Anything you make in Desk stays on your own site.
- There is no server access — no shell, no connection to the database (Desk's read-only reports aside), no container, no app source. You work in your own editor and language and call your site over HTTPS.
- Manifests are installed by us until self-service install ships. Send us the manifest; we install it on your site with our own installer and log it. The kit's deploy to my sandbox command will later do this with your own key.
- The data is test data. Never put a real shopper's data, a real payment account, a real fiscal service or a real mail server on your site. None is connected.
- Mail is off. The site never sends a message to anyone.
- Server scripts are off. They do not run on any of our sites.
| You may | You may not |
|---|---|
| Configure anything a customer's administrator can: prices, promotions, coupons, POS Studio, receipts, workflows, numbering, permissions, reports | Install a Python app on the site or the server |
| Make roles and users, and an API key for each connected app (one app, one user) | Reach a server, connect to the database, or reach a container or the app source |
Call the API from your own machine or server over HTTPS, and run api/collection/run.sh |
Run server scripts, or rely on client scripts, custom HTML blocks or script print formats (intake refuses them) |
| Check a manifest locally, then ask us to install or uninstall it on your site | Change a total after the cashier has seen it, or override or patch iVendNext (the four rules, guide chapter 3) |
| Register a feed reader and subscribe webhooks to your own public address | Use a hosted till key, which is for our Custom Development team only |
| Make a till key answered by your own public HTTPS server (private and loopback addresses are refused; use a tunnel or a public test server) | Ask for another builder's site or data |
| Open a POS day on a till and run sales to test your work | Leave a POS day open at the end of a test |
Close every POS day you open. An unclosed day holds its cashier in every later test and fails far from its cause. Your tests should close what they open.
The full recipe, with your first hour on the site, is The hosted sandbox site.