Cart display issue

[BeerHunter]

Hi Nadeem,

Suresh contacted me via e-mail and provided me with FTP upload details. I was able to e-mail the site to him.

My support query # is 00038793.

Thanks,
Lonnie

[BeerHunter]

Ok now, this is getting a bit rediculous. As you can see from the previous thread, I was contacted by Actinic on December 13th with an apology for taking so long. They have not contacted me since. Even when I have sent them e-mails asking for an update.

I can understand delays when certain problems arise but no communications at all is totally unacceptable.

As I have mentioned earlier in this thread, this is an important issue to me. We are going live on January 3rd and I still cannot get this cart order sorted out.

Since I have not heard back from Actinic I have had to try a fix this issue myself. I have had no luck repairing our existing site so I began the huge task of creating a new site on a new server with a new install of Actinic and guess what? IT IS STILL NOT DISPLAYING THE CONTENTS IN ORDER. I haven't done any modifications to any of the scripts or templates. At first I thought it might have something to do with the product reference number but this is not the case. The products are not listed in the order of their respective number either. I created all the products in the order that I want them to appear in the cart and that didn't work either.

Am I the only one?? If anyone else is using a "Single Add to Cart" option, are you able to view the cart contents in the same order that they appear on your shop pages?

Please, please, if anyone can help or offer any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[NormanRouxel]

I think Nadeem correctly answered you on the 4th November. He said that products are ordered in the Cart in Product Reference order.

If you've chosen not to use Product References then Actinic creates them for you (starting at 1) for each product you add.

This may lead to unexpected results as product references are really text strings, not just limited to numbers. So 123 will sort below (say) 55 as these are sorted as strings starting at the first character and 1 is lower than 5. If this seems confusing think of them as dictionary entries - not numeric values.

As this may not lead to the sequencing you want, all you have to do is to go to View / Business Settings / Options and clear Auto Generate Product References.

Then make sure that your products use references in the same sequence as they appear on your sections (or as you want them ordered in the Cart). It would be a good idea to use numbers like 00001, 00002 ... 00999, etc (and not just 1, 2, 3) for the reasons detailed above.

If you don't want these references to appear on the catalog then just recheck the Auto Generate Product References and they will disappear from view but the ones you set will be remembered.

Make sure you clear Auto Generate Product References before adding or moving any products.

***************************

PS As to expecting products to be added in the time dependent order that the user clicks them on a single-add-to-cart page, that just won't happen.

The HTML specification makes no demands on a web browser to return form fields (all those Quantity boxes) in any specific order. Also there are lots of browsers out there and they may all implement FORM posting in different ways. As long as the data gets to the server, the order is considered unimportant.

[BeerHunter]

Thank you so much for your reply Norman.

I will work on creating my own product reference numbers to see if it will correct this problem.

I have included a screencap to show you that the existing products using automatically generated reference numbers do not appear in order.

One question, if I use product reference number like 00001 should I be setting the "Product Reference Character Count" to 5 or?

Once again, thank you for your reply. Now I'm off to work with your suggestions.

Seasons Greetings,
Lonnie

[BeerHunter]

I have changed the product reference on a couple of products to see the results. I still can't figure out what is going on.

I understand what you are saying about the characters being read as text and not numbers. This gave me the idea that I could probably use "letters" rather than "number" but the results were still not as predicted.

Here are two more screencaps. Both orders were made by selecting 1 of each item, starting at the top.

If it came right down to it, all that I really need is to have the main product always at the top. The rest of the products being in order is not as important.

Anyways, I don't know what to do now but cry.

[NormanRouxel]

Well I tried with a freshly made section and got unexpected results. Sometimes it worked as expected, but altering the product references to a new sequence sometimes failed. Each time it failed to maintain a sequence it did, however, keep to the same wrong sequence.

What seems to be happening is that the AddMultiple routine in ShoppingCart.pl adds items to the Cart in the order it finds them when cycling through the input data hash.

The routine ReadAndParseInput in ACTINIC.PM is responsible for reading the data from the web-site and is returning items in a somewhat random manner from the input data. This is due to the input being stored in hashes (key, value), where the actual order is undefined. From that point on products are displayed in the munged order.

This won't be trivial to fix so I think you may have to live with it.

There's another effect. If you've added some items to the cart and then go and add another that wasn't yet in the cart, this gets added to the end of the cart list, regardless of its reference number. This makes some sense from a customers point of view, as they know where to look for their most recently added item (bottom of list).

[NormanRouxel]

This may help somewhat.

Edit ShoppingCart.pl (in Site1 - back it up first) and look for the line

my ($Status, $Message, $bFailure, $pFailures, $bAllowedToBuy);

the next line is

foreach $sItem (keys %::g_InputHash)

change it to

foreach $sItem (sort(keys %::g_InputHash))

and Multiple Add To Cart items will now be added in Product Reference order.

You'll still have out of sequence items if someone adds an extra item later that wasn't already in the cart.

[Ben]

Hi Lonnie

I'm sorry you didn't get a further response from Actinic Support. I think there may be a problem with the email communication because Suresh sent a further email on 15 Dec. I've asked him to contact you again today so please post here if you don't receive it.

Support will also be available on 29, 30 and 31 December.

Ben

[WorkwearHouse]

I have the same problem

Hi Nadeem (or anyone else at Actinic).

Just been reading this thread and wondered if it ever got resolved. I have the same issue where products in the shopping cart are not displayed in the correct order.

The order in the shopping cart does not following the order in which products are arranged in the catalogue nor do they follow the same numbering of the product reference code.

I have set up a test site where you can see the problem for yourself. The URL of a test product is:

http://pencarrie.hazelhost.co.uk/aca...weatshirt.html

If you add the main product and one of the secondary products that uses an "Other Info Prompt", the secondary product is always listed first in the cart. I need the main product to be listed first in the cart as this looks more logical for the shopper.

I'd appreciate any advice.

Regards

Bob

[WorkwearHouse]

Further to my last post, I should also mention that I have tried the patch that Norman recommended on 24th. Alas, this did not help.

The problem seems to be that if a product has a "Other Info" field, then this gets added to the cart first, regardless of it's position in the catalogue or its reference code.

Is there another patch for this, or will we have to live with it?

Thanks

Bob

[BeerHunter]

Hi Bob,

I was able to re-create the problem on an entirely new site with only 10 products. None of them used the "Info Question" field.

I cannot figure out how/why this is happening. I doesn't appear to have anything to do with product references or the order that they appear in the catalog.

Lonnie

[NormanRouxel]

Lonnie,

Did you try that little patch I mentioned on the 24th Dec?

It seemed (here) to fix the designed-in problem of form input being stored in Perl hashes (key, value), where the actual order, should you retrieve items sequentially, is undefined.

[BeerHunter]

Hi Norman,

Yes I have tried the patch and I thought that it fixed the problem. I added 3 items and it worked everytime. I thought I would add one more and... it failed.

I am going to review all of my product references tomorrow to be sure that I did not mess up.

Lonnie

[BeerHunter]

Hi Norman,

I checked all my product references and..... drum roll please YES IT WORKS!!! I had missed one of the references.

Norman, I thank you so much!

To some people this probably didn't seem like a very big deal. To me it was huge. We required the main product to trigger a new sales order when imported into our ERP system. If the products were out of sequence then the supplementary products would appear on the wrong sales order.

Norman, once again, thank you so much for your time.

Yours truly,
Lonnie

BTW -

You'll still have out of sequence items if someone adds an extra item later that wasn't already in the cart.

You solution did exactly what I needed it to do.

Main Product Number 1 (ERP sales order reference trigger)
Supplementary Product 2
Supplementary Product 3
Supplementary Product 4
Main Product Number 2 (ERP sales order reference trigger)
Supplementary Product 2
Supplementary Product 3
Supplementary Product 4

[WorkwearHouse]

Hi all

Good to hear that Lonnie's problem is now resolved.

However, I still have this problem on a new site that we are developing. We have tried the little patch that Norman suggested on the 24th.

In our case, the problem is with a product that has an Other Info Prompt. We have this product on a product page below a main product (using a single add to cart button).

The product with the other info prompt always appears first in the shopping cart, even though it is placed below the main product in the catalogue and even with a reference code that is alphanumerically below the main product.

To see what I mean, the development site with an example product is at http://pencarrie.hazelhost.co.uk/aca...weatshirt.html

Grateful for any advice.

Regards
Bob