Forum OpenACS Q&A: Problem: SilentPost back from Ewebcart

We are using securenetshop.com's Shopping Cart for our site... It works well, we design our store pages with forms which go to their site and they maintain the shopping cart and calculate totals based on hidden vars on our forms and connect with the cc processing company.

So they have an advanced feature called silent post in which they SecureNetShop can POST order data to a file on your server. From their settings page:

The silent post will occur at the end of the ordering process and will be transparent to the shopper. The Silent Post URL should point to a CGI script or asp file that can accept url encoded data.
Example: http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/updatedb.cgi

# securenetshop silent post return.
set_form_variables 0

if { ![info exists total] } {
    set total "-1" 
}
if { ![info exists b_fname] } {
    set b_fname "No F name" 
}
if { ![info exists b_lname] } {
    set b_lname "No L name" 
}
# etc...

set db [ns_db gethandle]

set insert_statement  "insert into ewcart
(b_lname,b_fname, total, pdatetime, #more....)
values ('$b_lname', '$b_fname', '$total', sysdate(), #more...))"

ns_db dml $db $insert_statement
ns_db releasehandle $db

ns_returnredirect "http://www.greatestnetworker.com"

This script works both with form variables from my adp test page and if I just paste vars into the URL.

Mike at SecureShopNet can do the URL vars/ Form Vars but his test script (to simulate the silent post) does NOT work. It returns this header response info:

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 13:11:15 GMT
Location:
http://www.greatestnetworker.com/ssnet/ssnet_post.tcl?
total=999&b_lname=OConnor&b_fname=Bob
Server: AOLserver/3.2+ad12
Content-Length: 384
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Client-Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 12:57:40 GMT
Client-Peer: 208....
MIME-Version: 1.0
Title: Redirection

(DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN")
(HTML)
(HEAD)
(TITLE)Redirection(/TITLE)
(/HEAD)
(BODY)
(H2)Redirection(/H2)
(A
HREF="http://www.greatestnetworker.com/ss_net/ssn_post.tcl?total=999
&b_lname=OConnor&b_fname=Bob")The requested URL has moved here.(/A)
(P ALIGN=RIGHT)(SMALL)(I)AOLserver/3.2+ad12 on
http://www.greatestnetworker.com(/I)(/SMALL)

My AolServer uses Jerry's Virtual Server setup to redirect from Main to the TGN instance of AOLserver.

Is is possible that the silent post isn't working because of the redirects? I also have an ns_returnredirect at the end of my code just to go somewhere so that the serverlog doesn't show an error.

SUMMARY
Mike and I CAN post to this new table with both URL vars and FORM vars.
SecureShopNet Server Can NOT post.

IS there something I can do so I can get these VARS back from SecureShopNet?

IF I can, then I can update our database with purchase info and make the memberships TOTALLY automatic rather than make members click a link (which they sometimes don't.)

Thank you
-Bob

Thanks Jonathan,

I'm trying Robert Schlaff's (August 14th) suggestion to use direct port numbers :2001 Instead of the vhost redirect from :80.

-Bob

But do make sure you are putting in the port number, as this report sounds very much like the problem I just fixed.

Regarding simulating POSTs, what I usually do is use AOLserver and the ACS itself.  The ACS contains a utility, util_httppost which can be used to POST to another webserver.  What you can do is set up AOLserver on the machine you want to test "from", connect to the nscp port, and then in that tcl shell, use util_httppost to create a POST from the test machine to your target machine.

Since you are using my AOLserver patches, you can experiment with turning DEBUG on and DEV on within your config.tcl's ns/parameters section.  This should cause most every byte sent or received from your AOLserver process to be dumped out in HEXL (HEX and ASCII) format in your server log, and that can help you catch the problem, and determine if it is AOLserver that is dropping the ball, and if so, where.

I'm a little confused (early morning, bad memory, two kids needing breakfast).  I should think that the 302 has nothing to do with your nsvhr setup.  Also, if you're giving it the port directly, that again suggests it's not nsvhr.

Regardless, I would recommend upgrading to 3.3 and the new nsvhr for a variety of reasons.

I'll be out until about noon pacific time, but you might try using util_httppost or something to post some binary to http://www.theashergroup.com/junk/test.tcl.  Name the variable test and it should spit the results back to you.  It may or may not work with binary, so if it doesn't work, the results are just inconclusive.

Well, Mike from SSN says that it is binary... I don't know why... AND I'd be happy to try to capture what they send if you have a script that works on the old AOLserver/OpenACS from May 2000.  That is the machine now collecting data from the SSN silent posts...

-Bob