wayne

I currently use Eselect Plus (Moneris) payment gateway. I have been searching the web for reviews on this service as I have been having some issues lately. Needless to say I cannot find anything. I was wondering if anyone here would like to comment on the service you use. I am particularly interested in reliability and frequency of failed transactions. Wayne

PHP and SQL will take you where you want to go unless you want to add some perl and cgi scripting. I have found that over the last year I can do all my form processing with a very basic knowledge of PHP whether it is to email the form content to someone or send the data off to a database. Dreamweaver makes it very easy to present the data from the Mysql database onto a web page. I don't use Go Live (from Adobe) or FrontPage (Microsoft) however they probably work fine as well. Again do some reading first. I know that those with alot of experience probably prefer to by pass these programs but for beginners, they really speed things up. Take a weekend and go to the library and browse the book mentioned above. Then go out and buy one of the many books on PHP (most include a section or two on database connectivity as well). You will want a book as reference. You can get help from http://www.php.net/ which is the best resource however I find that I have to know what I am looking for here. I still find it hard to understand the many explanations on this site unless I have a basic understanding first of what I am looking for. PHP has really made my life much easier. Just my 2 cents worth, good luck. Wayne

Actually that is a good idea, I am going to try that for my database. I also write to a text file as a backup in case I ever loose the database for some reason. My problem is that I have more than a hundred fields in the form. Most of them are check boxes that users can select. I have to write each field to a file irregardless if they check the item or not and I was hoping to figure out some kink of loop where I can cycle through the $_POST array to get all the fields written. This text file looks like this: field 1, field 2, ...fieldn field 1, field 2, ...fieldn field 1, field 2, ...fieldn I do not have the field names in the file just the data. When I tried the code above the field order was all messed up.

page 1 is a form page 2 is a confirmation page so user can make sure data entered is correct Form data is put in an array so I can carry it to multiple pages easily. My array is $rvardata[] My form has fields like: <input type="text" name="rvardata[name]" size="20"> <input type="text" name="rvardata[address]" size="20"> <input name="rvardata" type="checkbox" value="1"> With only a couple of lines I can test or perform actions on all form data collected like: foreach ($rvardata as $key_var =>$value_var) { $rvardata[$key_var]=HTMLSpecialChars($rvardata[$key_var]); } Now I have a function to write the array to a database on another page. My problem is that how can I predetermine the order of the data in the array. I can put an echo statement in the above code to see the order printed out in a page however I want to create a function that will insert data into a database automatically and my output is not in the same order as the order that the form fields appear on the page. If I reset a value on another page like: if($rvardata =="1") $rvardata = "brown"; Does this mean that $rvardata will move to the end of the array? Hope this makes sense. Thanks.

I have about 30 different forms in my website. Each form writes to a mysql database (via PHP). What is the best approach from a server load/ efficiency of writing data etc. point of view? To have one database for each form OR to use 1 database with a separate table for each form. Note that the data from each form is not related to the data from other forms. I am also asking this from the point of view that I have a password protected area that links to all the databases so I can display information easily. This page connects to the 30 databases and I am wondering if this would create a bottleneck if at the same time customers are submitting data from my forms and there are so many database connections going on at once. Is this something I should be concerned with? Thanks

How about PHP. If you work with dreamweaver you do not have to know how to write PHP code. I do something similar where a user registers for an event and when the transaction comes back as accepted, the PHP code writes the registrant information to my mysql database. Then another page lists all registrants alphabetically as they enter various events. Sounds like you want to do something similar only with url's. I know this does not tell you how to do what you want, but maybe my post will give you an idea on the tools that you can use to accomplish it with some further reading. Wayne

I don't beleive it lists alphabetically. Looking through the OScommerce site they do not have the ability to order the attributes in the program without an add in. I have the attributes: watch -black watch -red no thanks watch -tan watch -navy Even if I remove "no thanks" and re add it, it does not go to the end or the beginning. Anyways the link I provided above works really well. Wayne

Well I just found a fix. It works great by adding another field in the admin tools. You can add a number for the attribute 0 being first in the list, 1 next, 2...... To get the add in go to http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1690 Wayne

When I add product attributes I always include one attribute called "no thanks" and set the price to $0.00 All works fine except that this option seems to appear randomly in the list of product attrbutes for a product. eg. Product: picture $25 Attribute is Frame wide border add $15 narrow border add $12 no thanks metal frame add $20 See what I mean? I want the no thanks to appear at the beginning of the list (or the end) but not in the middle. Any ideas? Thanks Wayne

While my payment gateway is processing a transaction and I am waiting for a message to be returned , I do not want my customers to close their browser or go to another page before the results come back. I want to create a script that it will say or flash the message "processing" while waiting for the message to be returned by the bank. Based on this message then I already have php code that will either give a receipt or indicate that the transaction has been declined. Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated. Wayne

I have a my own ssl certificate installed and all is working fine as far as a customer is concerned. However when I go to the admin section to retrieve an order, the page with the credit card info is being sent without encryption. For eg. I go to https://www.****/eshop/admin/orders.php Then I click on an order to view the details but this defaults back to http://....... Any suggestions? Thanks Wayne

I used cpanel at my old host to create a mysql backup. When I uploaded the backup here, and go to phpmyadmin there are no tables. I had one table before so I created the table in case it has to exist before I restore however still no luck. Any advice?