Collecting form fields for a cart item

[angian]

i have just downloaded catalog. My problem before purchasing it is that some of my products require specific information to be input.

I don't mind too much how this information gets back to me, ie it does not have to be put into a database or anything, but it should be part of the order that is downloaded, or worst case sent as a seperate email which i can match up to the order later.

My question is how do i get this additional data into my cart item?

One of our products is a Limited Company formation and we need to capture data such as company name, directors names, addresses, DOBs and nationalities, the current form is at www.fastformations.com/formation.htm

Ideally i need all of this data collected, and if not, i need a way of breaking out to an html page to collect this before returning back to the cart to possibiliy choose more products and finalise.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[James M SellerDeck]

Hi Ian

To be able to do this you would have to customise the perl scripts so that these fields in your form would be included in the downloaded order.

I cant really see a way that you would do this, as it seems quite a complex task.

Otherwise, you could just create a link to this form page for the required products, asking the buyer to fill out the form before they add the product to the cart.

[NormanRouxel]

I can probably customise the scripts to do what you want but there is a simpler, but incomplete, solution.

Use the Extended Info popup page to display something like your existing form on these products.

Either paste your entire form code surrounded by !!< and >!! into the Text field (this allows HTML to be embedded in your text) or use a customised Layout template that contains your form code.

This will mean that the information arrives separately from the order details but you should have some common info in both to match them with.

If you want Perl patches to add this to the downloaded order then contact me by e-mail.


Norman

[NormanRouxel]

Another thought. In your pop-up form (via a customised Layout template) if you have a field

<input type=hidden name="PRODUCTID" value="NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE">

Then this will add the Actinic profuct reference to your customer submitted info, making it a bit easier to match things up.

Norman

p.s. If you still have the Demo Site then there's a product with a popup on
Online Catalogue / Products with a Range of Options - it's the boot.

[zmagyar]

Actually I seem to recall that we have size limit of 255 on the other info prompt which could be used to record extra info related to a product. Therefore I believe this info can only be captured separately.

Regards,

[NormanRouxel]

The Other Info Prompt text is limited to 255 characters. The input data has a MAXLENGTH of 1000 characters.

This rules out my "Multiple Other Info Prompts" patch as you'd never get all the field names into 255 bytes and there's probably more than 1000 bytes of user input as well.

However I don't think there's any real limit in what can be stored in the session (shopping cart) file but the problems in getting it there.

Norman