[WEEKLY] Issue #23: February 6, 2003

By Harald Ponce de Leon

February 6, 2003

Announcements Mailing List Fix
Checkout Procedure Chicken And Egg Problem
Order Total Shipping Module Tax Update
Administration Tool -> Invoice Update
Default Text Updated
Control Characters In The Database Dump Removed
Blank Records Being Inserted In Orders Table
Free Shipping Feature Completed
Shipping Module Tax Assignment
USPS International Shipping Fix
Order Total Low Order Fee Module Fix
Warnings Now Shown With Disabled Products
Order Comment And Status Updates
..And The Release Date For Milestone 1 Is..

Announcements Mailing List Fix

There was a slight problem with new subscriptions occuring on the announcements mailing list, which was fixed last week.

If problems are experienced, please be sure to report the problem to a team member.

Team members are shown here:

http://www.oscommerce.com/about/team

Checkout Procedure Chicken And Egg Problem

The checkout procedure was broken since the introduction of the dynamic module status feature, as the payment modules could not access the order information and were not passing the hidden fields (module parameters) to their gateway.

This was reported fairly late by David Garcia Watkins (thanks!).

The chicken and egg problem included the order class and the payment modules, each needing information from each other when the classes were being instantiated.

The order class needed the payment module title, and the payment modules needed the order destination information for the new dynamic status feature when the payment module was assigned a zone.

The solution to the problem was to instantiate the payment modules first, then the order class afterwards. A call to the new update_status() method (in the payment module) is made manually to set the status of the payment module dynamically if it has been assigned a zone. The logic used in the update_status() method was otherwise executed in the module/class constructor when being instantiated.

The update_status() method does not break the payment modules in the contributions section as the main payment class uses logic to detect if the method exists or not - if the method does not exist then that module has obviously not been updated to take advantage of the new dynamic status feature and is thus made available on a global scale.
 
The logic keeping the "compatibility" with contributed modules may be removed once 2.2 goes gold.

Order Total Shipping Module Tax Update

The tax class assigned to the order total shipping module is now being described with the tax rate title instead of the tax rate value, which matches the previous changes mentioned in the last weekly report.

For this to work properly, the default sort order of the order total modules has changed from:

subtotal
tax
shipping
total

to:

subtotal
shipping
tax
total

Administration Tool -> Invoice Update

A problem with the Invoice feature on the Administration Tool has been fixed, which was only displaying the first attribute of a product regardless if more attributes for that product existed.

Thanks go to Gabriel Levy for pointing this out.

Default Text Updated

The default text shown on the front page of a newly installed osCommerce store has been updated to inform the store administrator or developer where the default text can be changed.

This should lower the amount of questions asked on the forums of how to modify the text shown on the catalog.

Control Characters In The Database Dump Removed

For some reason two control characters existed in the oscommerce.sql database dump, which prevented some versions of phpMyAdmin from successfully importing the data.

Thanks to the person who submited the bug report (#920; sorry, could not find your name anywhere).

Blank Records Being Inserted In Orders Table

A problem was fixed with the product downloads feature with blank records being inserted in the orders_products_download table when products ordered contained attributes.

This only occured when the product downloads feature was enabled.

Free Shipping Feature Completed

The free shipping feature has been completed now that the shipping quotes are no longer displayed on the checkout shipping page when free shipping is active for that order.

Shipping Module Tax Assignment

The above mentioned update to the order total shipping module tax update has been overruled with the tax class assignment being moved to the shipping module level.

This provides more control and flexibility when only certain shipping modules should be assigned a tax class. (Previously it was set at a global level affecting all shipping modules)

The updated sort order of the order total modules remains unaffected and is still needed.

USPS International Shipping Fix

Brad Waite forwarded an update to the USPS shipping module which fixed a problem when international rates were used.

The checkout confirmation page had shown the first international rate shown on the shipping method selection page instead of the selected rate the customer chose.

Order Total Low Order Fee Module Fix

Günter Sammet reported (#455) a problem with the tax calculation made on the order total low order fee module.

The tax calculations were being based on the customers address instead of the shipping destination address.

Warnings Now Shown With Disabled Products

Warnings are now shown when a customer clicks on a link to a disabled product.

The warnings will be enhanced later in the 2.2 Milestone path to be user friendly and to show other products in the same category which the customer may be interested to look at.

This is important with stores being indexed by search engines and when guests click on a search result link which leads to a currently disabled product.

Order Comment And Status Updates

The order comments are now stored at the order status history level, allowing for multiple comments to be displayed on the Administration Tool.

With this update, the comment box that was shown on the checkout success page has been moved to both shipping selection and billing selection checkout pages.

Due to technical reasons, the comment box is not able to be placed on the checkout confirmation page (by default) due to dynamic payment modules which need to contact their gateway over a secure connection. This can be overruled when using cURL or native openSSL features found in PHP 4.3 releases, which is not done by default due to the projects compatibility goals.

..And The Release Date For Milestone 1 Is..

All of the Milestone 1 entries found on the Workboard have been completed (some entries are still pending commit or pending to be reviewed, one has been moved to MS2), which leaves the question "when will Milestone 1 be released?".

Bug reports will be looked into over the weekend to make sure the main features and logic existing are known-bug free. No target date is set, though Sunday looks to be the perfect candidate.

The Workboard can be found at:

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/workboard
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