Merry Christmas from Bailey the Unknown Reindeer
January 14, 2009
Merry Christmas from Bailey the Unknown Reindeer
Shopping for a new shopping cart?
I’ve been doing some new things to my Web site with the help of Alpha Five, and wanted to share experience with you.
Recently, I created an updated shopping cart feature for my site, Liberty Manuals. The new shopping cart uses a MySQL database. For years, we entered orders into Alpha Five manually. The new cart gives us the capability of exporting the data to a .csv file.
I then developed a series of operations that imports, appends, and posts. I then attached those operations onto a button using Action Scripting.
Now, the daily office routine is a piece of cake, and that’s what I think databases are all about. But be careful. Import first into a separate table, and then append to your main table. And check to be sure that the field types are the same in both tables.
For example, you might want the item ID to be a character field, but the import genie creates a numeric field. Then, when you go to append it to the main table, you get an error that the field types don’t match.
Yuck. I hate that message! The problem is easily fixed, but I like it better when things work the first time around. (Okay, call me a dreamer.) The reward is pressing the final button that makes everything work. Heaven!
With Alpha’s packaged e-commerce application, you can create a complete, fully functioning, “ready for business” online catalog, shopping cart, and e-commerce system. Or, it can be used as a framework for your own Web application. In either case, all you need is a copy of Alpha Five to edit the application, and the Alpha Five Application Server to deploy it.
Now, I must get to those gifts I was telling you about this weekend. From my home in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina to wherever this finds you, I wish you a very happy holiday. And happy shopping!
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