"View Cart" button generates 404 error

[NickD]

On the home run now for the v9-v10 upgrade, trying to get the site functioning OK for the VAT increase tonight. and have discovered that my "View Cart" button no longer works, generating a 404 error.

www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk

The link for the "View Cart" buttton is

http://www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk/acatalog/%3Cspan%20style='color:%20#ffffff;'>http://www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk/cgi-bin/ca000001.pl?ACTION=SHOWCART</span>

which seems to me to be too long, contain all sorts of stuff that doesn't pertain to viewing the cart, and is a bit of a mouthful. If I extract the "right looking" part of this link, i.e.

http://www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk/cgi...CTION=SHOWCART

and pop that into the browser bar it seems to work.

If the link is being corrupted, how is this happening and how do I put this right? This would seem to be autogenerated and not something I have control over.

This problem occurs in both IE8 and Firefox, and the "View cart" button is the only one on the navigation bar that is broken. All the rest appear to function correctly so it doesn't seem to be a problem of a general nature.

All input gratefully received.

Nick

[Duncan Rounding]

In design View you should be ablke to find the link which should be something like this:
<a href="<actinic:variable name="CartLinkText" />" class="xxxxxx"><actinic:variable name="CartText" /></a>

[NickD]

I found that - the actual text is

<span class="actxxsmall">[</span>&nbsp;<a href="<actinic:variable formatting="font(Color|ffffff)" name="CartLinkText" />" target="_self"><span class="actxxsmall"><strong><actinic:variable name="CartText" /></strong></span></a>&nbsp;<span class="actxxsmall">]</span>

"CartLinkText" would seem to be the one which needs looking at - but it's not clear to me how to inspect the text it uses. Presumably the final text employed is a composite containing the site URL.

How do I inspect the actual link text components?

[Duncan Rounding]

You can replace CartLinkText with:

http://www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk/cgi-bin/ca000001.pl?ACTION=SHOWCART

[NickD]

Thanks for that.

Well, yes, and that of course works, and I can use it as a stop-gap, however it isn't really the way to go longer term - hardcoding links like that isn't good practice and is inconsistent with the Actinic approach; what after all is the point of having variables such as "CartLinkText" if they are overridden in this way & thus never used? Also will the stop-gap fix work in all circumstances? Are the links supposed to be different when a user with a customer account logs in as some are? (have not got round to testing that yet)

It would seem that the link built by Actinic is incorrect. Whether this is a CGI problem & Actinic is doing it's job incorrectly or if the raw data it uses to generate the link is flawed is unclear - if it's the latter then I still don't know how to check it as I suspect it's buried in coding somewhere.

V9 does not exhibit this problem.

Is this in fact a known problem in Actinic v10? Has anyone else experienced it?

Nick

[NormanRouxel]

The problem is probably someone using Actinic's Edit Appearance capability to erroneously add style tags where they're not appropriate. I think that you wanted to colour the CartText variable white (ffffff) but actually applied the edit appearance to CartLinkText (which is the links href value and cannot contain style tags).

Use this instead:

<span class="actxxsmall">[</span>&nbsp;
<a href="<actinic:variable name="CartLinkText" />" target="_self">
	<span class="actxxsmall"><strong><actinic:variable name="CartText" /></strong></span>
</a>
&nbsp;<span class="actxxsmall">]</span>

But this might be cleaner:

<span class="actxxsmall">[&nbsp;
<a href="<actinic:variable name="CartLinkText" />" target="_self">
	<strong><actinic:variable name="CartText" /></strong>
</a>
&nbsp;]</span>

[NickD]

Thanks Norman I'll try that & post my findings. For now I've useed the hardcoded link as other issues are more pressing and it works! Not aware of any changes in this area, I'll also look at an old snapshot & see if anything has changed.

Nick