XML Integration/E-Commerce Application

[advanceditri]

I am trying to integrate this service from Tech Data into the E-Commerce Application I recently purchased from Alphasoftware. It uses XML and I wanted to know if this can be done and how?

Here's a link to their service:
http://www.techdata.com/Content/XMLGuide/index.htm

Please let me know ASAP if there are any examples of this type of integration and how it was done.

Thank you,

Bob
Advanced IT Solutions

[NoeticCC]

Re: XML Integration/E-Commerce Application

You can already read XML files using extract_string(), but Version 9 will have a full XML parser that might make this easier...

[advanceditri]

Re: XML Integration/E-Commerce Application

Can someone point me to specific instructions on how to integrate this into the e-commerce application (Alphastore) that I purchased? I'm not grasping the concept of how the XML updates the database and/or tables, but I need to get this up and running very soon.

Thank you,

Bob

[NoeticCC]

Re: XML Integration/E-Commerce Application

Can someone point me to specific instructions on how to integrate this into the e-commerce application (Alphastore) that I purchased? I'm not grasping the concept of how the XML updates the database and/or tables, but I need to get this up and running very soon.

Alphasports Web works without XML, you don't need XML for that at all - you need to look at the documentation for the service you purchased that DOES require XML, to figure out what needs doing. What data gets transferred by XML then?

[Steve Wood]

Re: XML Integration/E-Commerce Application

The payment gateway requires an XML feed containing cart data, and returns an XML stream with the results of the purchase request.

The only XML involved is that outgoing and incoming stream. I can walk you through it, for starters here are the steps:

Either make your own page or use AlphaSports page that is the final page for processing the payment. On the AfterValidate event of that last page, you create an XML stream and send it to the payment gateway - that's another whole post but first read through their documentation and know what they want to receive and the format.

Then the payment gateway will immediately return a response (I did not read the docs, but this is the way it normally works). You will capture that response and parse out the information sent back to you. There will be information such as TransmissionOK=T/F, SyntaxOK=T/F, ResultGood=T/F (I made those up, yours will be different).

Based on what comes back you can set a message such as result_msg=Success or result_msg=Fail and then display an appropriate message to the user.

You also can and should update a transaction log with the results. Oh, you will need to have created a transaction log record on your side before you start the transmission attempt, because the payment gateway is going to want YOUR order number.

By the way, this isn't easy stuff.

Here, I will give you the part that sends, receives and starts to parse the results:

''SEND XML TO GATEWAY
dim url as c
dim body as c
url = t_gatewayurl
obj = ole.create("Msxml2.SERVERXMLHTTP")
obj.setoption(2,13056) 'ignore SSL errors
obj.open("POST", url, .f.)
obj.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
obj.send(req)
''CAPTURE RESPONSE XML
cc = obj.responseText

''PARSE RESULTS TO VARIABLES
''REGARDING REQUEST
r_resultCode 	= extract_string(cc, "resultCode=\"", "\"", 1)			' DID XML GET PROPERLY READ BY GATEWAY
r_success		= extract_string(cc, "success=\"", "\"", 1)				' REQUEST OK?
r_error			= extract_string(cc, "error=\"", "\"", 1) 				' GATEWAY ERROR?

The XML matching the gateway's requirements gets stored in the "req" variable. The variable "t_gatewayurl" holds the URL to the gateway. The variable "cc" will contain the response and you can see how I parse it.

V9 has some new tools to help with this last part.