> Is there a Coldfusion extension out there that can assist me? Yes, your fingertips ;D
I did one of these a couple of years ago. I added a vendor table, which included stuff like vendor name, physical location (important) fax number and primary key ID#. This ID number was also stored with each product record in a VendorID field. Customers could put items from a variety of vendors into a single cart. At checkout: The cart items (stored as discrete records in a cart table) were looped over and products.VendorID used to find the vendor's physical location, which was then used to calculate a proper shipping charge (shipping info - weight - was aggregated by vendor and then calc'd individually. All charges were then combined to a single total to the customer). There are ways you can speed this up, including query caching your vendor list, loading a list of vendors into arrays etc. I never bothered as my client only had 8 vendors. On the Admin side: When viewing the order, some vendor-by-vendor notification method was necessary. The VendorID embedded in the cart item record made this fairly simple. My client wanted to sidestep a lot of the security issues that go with transmitting online orders (i.e. they hit a budget limit) and used a fax transmission, so I just created a view of the order (i.e. cart) grouped by vendor ID. Clicking on a header for the vendor's group produced a printable, individual form to be faxed to the vendor. There are of course much better automated ways to do this. That's what the client wanted at the time. --Matt Robertson-- MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com ______________________________________________________________________ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
