Ubercart

Ok,

I am gonna tackle this using the custom PHP code option.

I dug around the code for a while... and have a question: Will this work? Are these the right variables I need to use:

if (time() > ($order->created+86400)) { // The order was created at least 24 hours ago..... }

(86400 = number of seconds in 24 hours)

If this is correct, then what else do I need to do in order to return TRUE for the custom PHP code Conditional Action? (I've never done this before)

I tried simply entering...

if (time() > ($order->created+60)) { return TRUE; }

...and configured the action to add a simple admin comment to the order.

I then completed an order, waited 60 seconds, and then checked the admin comments and nothing was added.

How exactly do we enter the PHP code to get the CA system to use it?

Thanks!
Mike

Been testing this all afternoon before I posted the above reply.

I was at a loss and trying to rethink the obvious and I think I see why it's not working...

The trigger I am using is "Customer completes checkout". Well, the current time that the order was created will never be greater than the time the order was created because they are one in the same.

So I am gonna look into a different trigger now.

Mike

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Now.... looking at the available triggers.... I don't think this is even possible with Conditional Actions..... :-/

Question: Is there a way to send PHP code to the Drupal cron process? Then I can just have a cron job check the order status & how much time has elapsed and be done with it all. What do you think?

I suppose I could use Conditional Actions as a cron alternative, as I could use a commonly occurring trigger, such as "Product node is added to cart", and then go hog-wild with the custom PHP code for both the condition and the action.... run a while statement for a database query of all sales orders to check status and elapsed time, but mannnnn I don't know how to do this at all.

I know how to pull up nodes, such as...

But I've never played with pulling orders from the database before. Looks like I know what I'll be doing all day tomorrow lol

Good night all,
BigMike

Ok guys check it out

This will return a list of orders that have been in the Pending status for more than 24 hours:

So this just needs a bit of tweaking for use as our Condition. Thoughts on this is that we don't need to return a huge list of orders that match. We only need the condition to be TRUE if any order is > 24 hrs. So for the Condition we can just break out of the while statement when a match is found and then return TRUE. Rest assured I will post up my final code that I am using once I get this all figured out.

Now for the Action what we can do is use the while statement to run through allllllll the orders that match and change their status to a user-defined status, like "Urgent" or "Attention". Yes, if you currently have a ton of incomplete orders this will take a few seconds to accomplish the first time it runs, but after that this won't be much of a load at all.

I've never written script to write to the database, so I am going to learn how to do that next. I will keep this updated

-Mike

Here is the code to update the status of order #12345:

This assumes that the status 'Attention' has already been added to the Order workflow (admin/store/settings/orders/edit/workflow)

Now I am gonna try to implement everything.

Ok guys, I got it. It's all done.

1) Create a new Order workflow as you see fit at admin/store/settings/orders/edit/workflow
2) Browse to admin/store/ca/add
3) Trigger: Product node is added to cart
4) Condition: No condition needed at all. The trigger is all we need.
5) Actions: "Execute custom PHP code"

Enter the following into the "Custom PHP" field, using whatever workflow name you created in step 1:

6) Save changes. Done. Now whenever any product is added to any cart, this CA will check for missed Sales Orders.

Things to consider:

This is like a poorman's poormansCAcron LOL but we have the power to do whatever we want with PHP. This "cron job" as I am calling it, will be called whenever a product is added to a cart. So you might be thinking... Hmmm that is a lot of calls to the database which will put a strain on your server. So here are some considerations to keep in mind:

1) We are only querying the Database for Pending orders. Yes, as I mentioned before, the first time you run this it will update the status on however many Pending orders you have, which may require some resources, but after this process, you are only going to have however many Pending orders you have in less than a 24 hour time period after the last visitor or user added a node to her cart. So it may only be calling a dozen or so database values, which isn't so bad.

2) Keep "cron" in mind and realize that hey, we control it as we see fit with PHP, so why not add PHP code before all of this to only run our code say every other hour (just check if the current hour is odd or even), or how about only run the code once a day between maybe 6am and 10am, assuming you'd have at least 1 visitor add at least 1 product to his cart.

3) Moreover, you could use the Trigger for "Customer completes checkout" which will be less frequent than visitors adding nodes to their carts, just remember this requires subsequent checkouts to occur within 24 hrs from one another..... if you need to be that precise with your 24 hr time period, or whatever time period you set. Be sure to change your variable name to something other than $order as this may conflict with the available PHP variable $order.

So you can see that this can be as flexible as you want. This is really cool!

Ok enough for now! CYA!
BigMike

I know this is old news, but to bring more closure to this I finally found out where I read this, see this reply #3: http://drupal.org/node/649306#comment-2334330

Posted by longwave on December 3, 2009 at 10:19am:

We are really really really glad I figured all this out. It is working out REALLY GREAT for us. Hope this info helps someone in the future. I also figured out how add classes & theme the orders page (admin/store/orders) so I can change the background-color of each row for orders depending on their current Status level. Managing orders has never been so easy for our team.

Regards,
BigMike