Help with Advanced Customisation please

[Duncan]

My client was hoping to be able to generate a warning if the total orders from his site was not divisable by 12 essentially.

Let me explain - he is selling bottled beers and for shipping purposes he wants to ship the bottles in crates of 12. Therefore customers can order as many differing beers as they like in their crate(s) but the each crate must be FULL. The reason being that the bottles are likely to break if the crates arent full.

I have phoned Actinic and they cant help me and suggested I post in here. I can see how to achieve this if I had hand coded this in php without a problem but being locked in Actinics setup and no real working knowledge of Perl I'm a bit stuck!!

The simple workaround is for me to put some static html in the basket page that will warn/remind the customer regardless of whether they have a "complete" crate or not. But I wondered if it was in fact possible to perform a check on the total quantity variable (which ever that is) and output the text depending on the result in some way??

Am I asking too much of Actinic here?

TIA

[NormanRouxel]

Would you have any non bottle items for sale that might mess with the overall count?

Norman

[Duncan]

No so at least from that POV the calculation is simple

[NormanRouxel]

OK. I'll have a peek at the Perl and see if it's feasible.

Norman

[ditch]

Why not change the product to Crate of Bottles instead of individual bottles?

You could simply change the product description to read crate of bottles, multiples of twelves. Then add a prompt over the add to cart button 'Crate Of 12 Bottles!'

Regards

Rich

[NormanRouxel]

Or just stuff empty bottles into the spaces. Send me some full ones and I can return them empty.

Norman

[garyhay]

I will have some too please.

I do agree with Norman that stuffing something else in there should do.

Try this

www.grampianpackaging.co.uk

[NormanRouxel]

Damn - there go's the beer. I just thought of a simple possible solution that doesn't involve patching Perl. There's a very simple Javascript routine already available that returns the number of items in the cart. You could use this routine to see if the cart contains anything and to put a warning on the page it it's not MOD 12.

<script language="JavaScript">
var bottles = getCartItem(3) - 0;
if ( bottles + ( bottles % 12 ) )document.write('<font color=red>Remember - you must have multiples of 12 in your cart when you check out</font>');
</script>

Will do it. This can be put in Act_Primary and would appear nearly everywhere. You could also use it to disable the Checkout button.

You could add code to this to have the message say something like:- "you need to add 3 or remove 9" for those who can't count.

If youre interested you can look in actinicextras.js to see the cookie code.

Norman

[Duncan]

Aha that sounds just what I was looking for Norman thanks very much indeed. I'll have a look at that .js file

Another query I have,as of this morning- is it possible to generate an alphabetical list of all products in the store in one list that currently reside under their individual sections without text images etc. i.e just there names along with a hyperlink to the actual product?

[NormanRouxel]

I don't think you could do that automatically.

One way would be to make a new section called "All Products", set a CustomProductLine.html that displays just the fields you want, copy ALL your products into there, order them by hand, and add all the links by hand. If you've a reasonable number of products it might be worth the hassle. We've got 4,000!

Another way to get the products into the All Product section mentioned above that might be worth investigating is via exporting your site.

This creates a hierarchical text file which could be edited to remove all but the product lines. Sort it on the appropriate field to sequence it as you require. You may have to import it into something like Excel or Access to sort it and re-export.

If you use automatic product references then you're OK. If not just use an editor (or Excel, etc) to add a prefix like "-" to all your product references. Now just add a line at the top needed to make this lot a single section. Re-import it as a hierarchical update and you've got the lot into a single section.

More work would be needed to automate the creation of the links to the real product.

Norman

[Duncan]

Thnaks once again Norman, it seems a bit long winded especially as he would want to link the products up to this too. I had hoped it would be easier somehow

[NormanRouxel]

It could also be implemented as a program that reads the catalog database and creates the required import file. You'd just then need a few clicks of the mouse to update that section.

All the data needed to do this is in that database but it would need quite a bit of programming and testing.

It might be a nice project for someone to do as an add-on but I doubt whether there's much demand.

If they were really brave it would update the products in the All Products section automatically, but I try to steer clear of writing to ActinicCatalog.mdb.

Norman

[NickD]

Hi

I have exactly this problem - as I sell wine by the case (of 12 bottles). How was this eventually resolved? In my case it's actually worse, as in addition to single bottles (each of which has a quantity of 1) I also sell mixed cases - each of which also has a quantity of 1 but which comprises 12 bottles, made up of 12 components which are the bottles in the range, each of which is a product in its own right. I think the warning approach might be best, simply manually rejecting orders which don't comply with the mod 12 constraint.

Nick

[NormanRouxel]

I just posted a solution to someone who wanted to prevent an order going through if the order value for different countries was below certain threshholds.

It would probably be easy to amend this to do the mod 12 limit instead. So as well as the warning they wouldn't be able to check out until the last crate was full.

It would involve a tiny Perl patch to OrderScript.pl. Let me know if it would be worth having please.

Norman