Shipping?

Why are there tutorials on everything having to do with rails EXCEPT
on calculating shipping costs for a shopping cart? there are 10 or so
blog posts about the “shipping_gem” or “active_shipping” but no real
details like how one might get the information from a form and then
pass the cost into the total for checkout. Does anyone know of a
tutorial i might have missed in the past two weeks for trying to
figure this out that actually details the process? I’m about ready to
put my head through a wall.

Thanks for any help.

Hi,
[email protected] wrote:

Why are there tutorials on everything having to
do with rails EXCEPT on calculating shipping
costs for a shopping cart?

Because it’s trivial?

What, exactly, are you having trouble getting your arms around? One
approach would be to use observe_field to submit the info on the items
as
they’re selected, calculate shipping and update a total shipping cost
field,
etc. There are, of course, alternatives. How do you want it to work
for
your app?

Next time, it might be a good idea to ask for help before you get angry
:wink:
It’s a very helpful community!

Best regards,
Billl

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:15:08PM -0700, [email protected] wrote:

Why are there tutorials on everything having to do with rails EXCEPT
on calculating shipping costs for a shopping cart? there are 10 or so
blog posts about the “shipping_gem” or “active_shipping” but no real
details like how one might get the information from a form and then
pass the cost into the total for checkout. Does anyone know of a
tutorial i might have missed in the past two weeks for trying to
figure this out that actually details the process? I’m about ready to
put my head through a wall.

At least one API (UPS) is under NDA, so there is no public code to
interface with it. See
http://redcorundum.blogspot.com/2008/02/quest-for-ups-api.html

Thanks for any help.
–Greg

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 4:17 PM, Gregory S.
[email protected] wrote:

At least one API (UPS) is under NDA, so there is no public code to
interface with it. See
Ruby, iOS, and Other Development: The Quest for the UPS API

Thank you for posting that – I needed a laugh.

I went through dealing with UPS a few years ago, and the bottom
line was: their API flat didn’t work.

As a sanity check I used their consumer web-based form to calculate
a shipping amount, and then compared to the API result. Oops. mmm.
Not compare equal. Bummer.

Long story short – UPS “tech support” couldn’t even understand
why this was a problem. After weeks of emails, providing test cases
and code, nothing. No resolution. I gave up. No UPS business from
that client.

So, to the OP – the technical side of this isn’t any big deal, but the
rest of it is a bundle of worms. Have fun :slight_smile:


Hassan S. ------------------------ [email protected]