Extending the Retail Groups

[mattih5]

Hi,

I've been reading the advanced manual for Actinic Version 7 and found some of the information really useful. One such useful section relates to visitors of my site who are registed (have accounts).

In our customer groups we have defined three groups: One; (Retail) already exists, Two; Registered Users and three; Bill Account.

The Registered Users group are people who have visited our site and bought a product off us, consequently they become registered.

The Bill Account group consists of customer we already have whom use another website of ours to view a electronic version of their ADSL and telephone usage, on a monthly basis.

We would like to keep the login for their bills and login for Actinic the same, as we offer facilities through Actinic which relate to their bills.

Consequently, what I am after is some way of stopping both Retail and Registered Users from accessing the Bill Account group areas. I currently use a feature of the advanced booklet to defer Retail Users from the Registered Users features, but would like a way to defer all groups except the 'Bill Account Users.'

Just to put this in perspective, I have 3 different levels of users who may purchase and use the Actinic site. I would like to know if anyone could help me deferring two of these groups from the third users area.

Kind Regards,

Mathew.

[mattih5]

I have found a temporary solution to this which is to use the facility Actinic offers with each product. To only show the product information to the specific groups - the groups I want.

But, does anyone know a better solution. One which will act as a immediate blockade when accessing a section and not a product?

Thanks

[cdicken]

OK - what you need to use is the 'ShowForPriceSchedules' functionality, which allows you to insert code that is only visible to certain customer groups.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what the customer group ID number of your 'Bill Account' customers is. To do this, you need to look in the ActinicCatalog.mdb database and look in the 'Price Schedules' table. Retail is normally '1' so your ID will either be '2' or '3'.

Then you can create a section link layout template that only appears to customers within the 'Bill Account' product group.

TO do this, open 'Act_SectionLine.html' and save it as 'Act_SectionLineBill.html'. Then replace the code in there with the following:

<Actinic:SHOWFORPRICESCHEDULE
Schedules="2" HTML="
<a href=&#34;NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONLINKl&#34;><b>NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONNAME</b></a>
"/>
NETQUOTEVAR:NEXT

(assuming the ID of your customer group is '2')

Notice that the quote marks are encoded with ". You can basically put anything you want in the HTML="..." expression as long as there are no quote marks.

This link into the section will then only appear for the selected customer group.