Raffle Redux - Again

[SteveColes]

This post is just to inform everyone, especially Bas and Jim and Tracy, what I'm am about to do and why.

As part of the upgrade to vB4, I thought we should adopt a common, more general purpose "shopping Cart" approach to things. Bas did it, thank you.:thumbs_up But while I thought it was a good idea, it really hasn't worked out, at least so far. Whne we wen to the donation drive there was a need for a "back end" to process the donations to drive the barometer. Since we didn't have time to do anything else, we used a vB4 version of the add on that we had used before. No centralized shopping cart for this.

Now we are in almost the same situation with the raffle except with a bit more time. Looking a the cart system. neither Jim nor I know of a way to hook in a back end in the cart to process the ticket numbers. In fact, I think we need to re look at the whole concept of a general purpose cart. But not now. Not enough time.

I could probably kludge something, but that makes me very nervous. So I will probably take Bas's system and convert it vB4. That should be the fastest and the most reliable.

 

[ehpoole]

Just a thought, but could we not use a cron job run (hourly/daily) against the microcart db tables?

I doubt if any of us would have the time to write such and adequately test it for this coming raffle, but perhaps in time for the next?

It is disappointing, though, that the cart system provides no mechanism for externally hooking into it for customization.

 

[b4man]

read...and have no idea what any of it means

 

[Bas]

The cart software I installed is definitely not easy to extend. We do have the actual PHP file we could hack up, but that's no better than custom code. I considered Ethan's approach as well, to simply poll the database and see if anyone needs to have numbers assigned & e-mailed. It's not elegant, but since the batch job only has to run during the raffle, it's not too big of a hit on the system.

Let me know if you have any questions about converting the code. It's a little crude, but there's only a handful of files to consider.

 

[SteveColes]

The cart software I installed is definitely not easy to extend. We do have the actual PHP file we could hack up, but that's no better than custom code. I considered Ethan's approach as well, to simply poll the database and see if anyone needs to have numbers assigned & e-mailed. It's not elegant, but since the batch job only has to run during the raffle, it's not too big of a hit on the system.

Let me know if you have any questions about converting the code. It's a little crude, but there's only a handful of files to consider.

Yeah, I also consider the chron job too. But then we need a chron job for donations during donation time. I'm going to have to really think this over for the longer term. But for now I'll convert yours to vb4. I've looked most of it over and don't see a real problem.

But you know I'll be screaming for help if I get too stuck.:rotflm: