Implementing Android POS Receipt Printing on Shopify

Receipts are an essential requirement of every brick-and-mortar business. They’re the proof of purchase that allows buyers to get refunds or make returns/exchanges. Only last year, we estimate that millions of receipts were printed by merchants running Shopify Point Of Sale (POS) for iOS. This feature was only available on iOS because Shopify POS was released first for that platform and is a few development cycles ahead of its Android counterpart. Merchants that strictly needed receipt printing support had no choice but to switch to the iPad but as of March 2019, merchants using an Android device now have the option to provide printed receipts.

The receipt generation process is unique because it’s affected by most features in Shopify POS (like discounts, tips, transactions, gift cards, and refunds) and leads to over 8 billion unique receipt content combinations! These combinations also keep growing as we expand to more countries and support newer payment methods. This article presents our approach to implementing receipt printing support, starting from our goals to an overview of all the challenges involved.

Receipt Printing Support Goals

These were the main goals the Payments & Hardware team had in mind for receipt printing support:

1. Create a Pragmatic API: printing a receipt for an order should be as simple as a method call.
2. Be adaptive: supporting printers from different vendors, models and paper sizes should be easily achievable.
3. Be composable: a receipt is made out of sections, like header, footer, line items, transactions, etc. Adding new sections, in the future, should be a straightforward task.
4. Be easy to maintain: adding or changing the content of a paper receipt should be as easy as UI development that every Android developer is familiar with.
5. Be highly testable: almost every feature in the POS app affects the content of a receipt and the combination of content is endless. We should be very confident that the content generation logic is robust enough to cover a multitude of edge cases.

The Printing Pipeline

In order to achieve our goals, first we defined the /Printing Pipeline/ by dividing the receipt printing process into multiple self-contained steps that are executed one after another:

The Printing Pipeline

During the Data Aggregation step, all the raw data models required to generate a receipt are gathered together. This includes information about the shop, the location where the sale is being made from, a list of payment transactions, gift cards used for payments (if applicable), etc.

In the Content Generation step, we extract all the meaningful data from the raw models to compose the receipt in a buyer-friendly way. Things that matter to the buyer, like the receipt language, date formats and currency formats are taken into account.

Now that we extracted all the meaningful data from the models, we move to the Sections Definition step. At this point, it’s time to split the receipt into smaller logical pieces that we call “receipt sections”.

Receipt Sections

After the sections are defined, the receipt is ready to be printed, so we move to the Print Request Creation step. This involves creating a print request out of the buyer-friendly receipt data and sections definition. A print request also includes other printer commands like paper cuts. Depending on the receipt being printed, there might be some paper cuts in it. For example, a gift card purchase requires paper cuts so the buyer can easily detach the printed gift card from the rest of the receipt.

Now a print request is ready to be submitted to the printer, the Content Rendering step kicks in. It’s time to render images for each section of the receipt according to the paper size and printer resolution.

The Printing Pipeline is finalized by the Receipt Printing step. At this point, the receipt images are delivered to the printer vendor SDK and the merchant finally gets a paper receipt out of their printer.

Printing Pipeline Implementation 

Data Aggregation

The very first step is to collect all the raw models required to generate a receipt. We define an interface that asynchronously fetches all these models from either the local SQLite database or our GraphQL API.

Content Generation

After all the data models are collected by the Data Aggregation step, they go through the PrintableReceiptComposer class to be processed and transformed into a PrintableReceipt object, which is a dumb data class with pre-formatted receipt content that will be consumed down the pipeline.

In this context, the use of a coroutine-based API for the Data Aggregation step presented earlier not only improves performance by running all requests in parallel, but also leverages code readability, as it can be seen in the snippet above.

The PrintableReceiptComposer class is where most of the business logic lives. The content of a receipt can drastically change depending on a lot of factors, like item purchased, payment type, credit card payment, payment gateway, custom tax rules, specific card brand certification requirements, exchanges, refunds, discounts, and tips. In order to make sure we are complying with all requirements and the proper display of all features on receipts, we took a heavily test-driven approach. By using test-driven development, we could write the requirements first in the form of unit tests and achieve confidence that data transformation covers not only all the features involved but also several edge cases.

Sections Definition

Now that we have all data put together in its own receipt model exactly like it will be on paper, it’s time to define what sections the receipt is made of:

Sections are just regular Android views that will be rendered in the Content Rendering step. In the Sections Definition step, we specify a list of ViewBinder-like classes, one per section, that is used during the receipt rendering step. Section binders are implementations of a functional interface with a fun bind(view: View, receipt: PrintableReceipt) method definition. All these binders do is bind the PrintableReceipt data model to a given view with little to no business logic in an almost one-to-one, view-to-content mapping. Here is an example of implementation for the total box section:

Print Request Creation

A PrintRequest is a printer-agnostic class composed by a sequence of receipt printer primitives (like lazily-rendered images and cut paper commands) to be executed by low-level printer integration code. It also contains the size of the paper to print on, which can be 2” or 3” wide. During this step, a PrintRequest will be created containing a list of section images and sent to our POS Hardware SDK, which integrates to every printer supported by the app.

Content Rendering

During this step, we will render each section image defined in the PrintRequest. First, the rendering process will inflate a view for the corresponding section and use the section binder to bind the PrintableReceipt object to the inflated view. Then, this bound section view will be drawn to an in-memory Bitmap at a desired scale according to the printer resolution for that paper size.

Receipt Printing

The last step happens in the Hardware SDK where the section Bitmap objects generated in the previous step will be passed down to the printer-specific SDK. At this point, a receipt will come out of the printer.

The Hardware SDK Pipeline

The POS app will convert an Order object into a PrintRequest by executing all the aforementioned pipeline steps and then it will be sent to the ReceiptPrinterProcessManager in the POS Hardware SDK. At this point, the PrintRequest will be forwarded to a vendor-specific ReceiptPrinter implementation. Since a printer can have multiple connectivity interfaces (like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or USB), the currently active DeviceConnection will then pass the PrintRequest down to the Printer Vendor SDK at the very last step.

The Hardware SDK is a collection of vendor-agnostic interfaces and their respective implementations that integrate with each vendor SDK. This abstraction enables us to easily add or remove support for different printers and other peripherals of different vendors in isolation, without having to change the receipt generation code.

Testing

Since receipt printing is affected by over 30 features, we wanted to make sure we had a multi-step test coverage to enforce correctness, especially when more advanced features, such as tax overrides, come into play. In order to achieve that, we heavily relied on unit tests and test-driven development for the Data Aggregation and Content Generation steps. The latter, which is the most critical one of all, has over 80 test cases stressing a multitude of extraordinary receipt data arrangements, like combinations of different payment types on custom gateways, or transactions in different countries with different currencies and credit card certification rules. Whenever a bug was found, a new test case was introduced along with the fix.

The correctness of the Sections Definition and Content Rendering steps is enforced by screenshot tests. Our continuous integration (CI) infrastructure generates screenshots out of receipt bitmaps and compare them pixel by pixel with pre-recorded baseline ones to ensure receipts look as expected. The Sections Definition benefits from these tests by making sure that each section is properly rendered in isolation and that all of them are composed together in the right order. The Content Rendering step, on the other hand, benefits from having canvas transformations asserted, so that the receipt generation engine can easily adjust to any printer/paper resolution.

Baseline screenshot diff on Github after changes made to the line items receipt section

Having a componentized and reusable printing stack gives us the agility we need to focus on extending support for new printer models in the future, no matter what printing resolutions or paper sizes they operate with and it can be done in a just a couple of hours. Taking a test-driven approach not only ensures that multiple edge cases are properly handled, but also enforces a design-by-contract methodology in which the boundaries between steps in the pipeline are well-defined and easy to maintain.

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If you like working on problems like these and want to be part of a retail transformation, Shopify is hiring and we’d love to hear from you. Please take a look at the open positions on the Shopify Engineering career page.