Thread: Phone order entry template?

When going through the Orders -> Phone order entry select a customer the iframe appears with the website within. Why is the template mssing and none of the styles applied?

The phone order impersonation frame does not load template.ascx. This means that the skinbase class is not accessed either. It loads the pages specifically and directly, allowing you to navigate through the website by putting in declared URLs in the "go box" and have much more control over the flow of your phone order traffic. Also, it is assumed that the admin using the phone order system is an employee of the site. This would render "page beautification" and navigation techniques unnecessary... nothing more than additional overhead.

Well is there a way for the template to also be shown/used in the phone order entry iframe?

Failing that how would I detect in an XmlPackage that querystring IGD has a value?

That's not something you can rely 100% on. IGD is not ALWAYS a member of the querystring in phone order entries, only the majority of the time. IGD however is always in the ThisCustomer.CurrentSession table in phone order entries, so your XMLPackage can use the ExtensionBase to read that session value. Setting the phone order entry page to utilize the template is not something that would end up being an easy work around that I can see. Can you tell us what you're trying to accomplish so that we can help you get there?

The reason I'm asking these questions is because my custom XmlPackage for product display is producing javascript errors in the phone order entry when viewing a product and can't add a product to basket. The reason I believe these javascript errors are occuring is because the template isn't being included, or I'm using custom add to basket buttons.

I would personally attempt to narrow down the cause of the javascript errors before attempting to alter the phoneorder.aspx page to include the template. That could potentially snowball quite a few problems that would then need attention. The most likely fix for this would be the inclusion of your javascript methods in your phoneorder.aspx page that is being called by your custom buttons. Would be a much cleaner fix, and something that wouldn't necessarily cause other issues.

you are using .js files which are not in the phone order template file. just add the same .js files to the phone order template, and my guess is the issue will be resolved.

I would like to resurrect this post, as I also have a similar problem.

Our order fulfilment staff use both the front end of our site, as well as the backend. When using the phone order entry, the template.ascx file is not loaded as suggested, however - when using the front end of the site AFTER completing a phone order entry - the site continues to be stripped of the template, therefore NO navigation, NO search facility, NO footers

basically - just the hometopintro (for the homepage), therefore making the front end of the site completely unusable in the instance they need to check a page to cross reference what a customer may be seeing (rather than the backend to view product information etc)

PLEASE can you tell me how to avoid this as its very frustrating (for the staff, and for me getting the complaints )


Cheers J

It's actually really easy... when you're doing a phone order, the template that drives the interface in the iframe (and the front-end) is:

/skins/<current_theme>/empty.ascx

Just copy your template into this file and it should be good to go. I had to rename the content place holder after I did this as it got named back to Placeholder1, in order to show the main content.

What i'd love to know is: is there any way to just change what template is being used when in phone order mode? This would alleviate any problems with changing templates (and potentially forgetting to change the empty.ascx one too).

cheers
greg

Because phone orders are displayed in an iframe, it is assumed that you will not want your full site template loading in there. There is no way (without code mods) to change the template file used by phone order entry. It generally is not required to change the empty.ascx file as phone order entry already provides product search and sitemap capabilities.

Thanks Dan,

I'm happy with just changing the empty.ascx template file to customise the phone order entry view. I can't find anything else that uses that template file - is it only used by phone order entry?

The reason we want to do this is that the service centre staff that will be doing the phone orders are not system administrators, and would be more familiar with the front-end shopping cart view than the back end. Also, we don't find the back-end phone order interface very intuitive, and we need to make it as easy as possible for staff to do phone orders on behalf of others.

Cheers
Greg

Hate to resurrect an old topic but we are having concerns with this as well.

Is there a way to show a different product page template when placing orders via the phone order system?

The reason we need to do this is because our website shows an "availability" field to the customer like "ships in 1-2 days", "ships today", "ships 2-3 days" etc.

This availability field does not properly show on phone order product pages, my guess is because its called from a custom xml package.

Also, for our order entry guys, we'd prefer to show the actual stock level number instead of the "ships in..." etc.

Is this possible?

Hi,

Glad you did resurrect an old thread - I see Jesse has a status of 'banned'?! Guess some toes were trod on somewhere.

As far as I remember, In v9, the phone order entry styling *should* look the same as the customer experience - certainly for the few client sites that are v9 and use phone order entry, I've seen the page style is the same.

For v8, I thought this was also the case but it sounds like I'm wrong.

I've done some work on code to allow you to switch page styling depending on whether you are in a phone order or not before (in v9 but the same concept should work in v8).

What I did, was to add the following method to SkinBase.cs:

Code:

public bool IsPhoneOrder 
{
	get {
		bool result = false;
		if (m_AdminCustomer != null)
		{
			if (m_AdminCustomer.CustomerID != m_ThisCustomer.CustomerID)
			{
				result = true;
			}
		}
		return result;
	}
}

Then, within any .aspx page, you can simply use:

if (IsPhoneOrder) {
Do something specific to phone orders...
} else {
It's a regular page
}

**Use the code above at your own risk**
Adam

Originally Posted by webopius

Hi,

Glad you did resurrect an old thread - I see Jesse has a status of 'banned'?! Guess some toes were trod on somewhere.

As far as I remember, In v9, the phone order entry styling *should* look the same as the customer experience - certainly for the few client sites that are v9 and use phone order entry, I've seen the page style is the same.

For v8, I thought this was also the case but it sounds like I'm wrong.

I've done some work on code to allow you to switch page styling depending on whether you are in a phone order or not before (in v9 but the same concept should work in v8).

What I did, was to add the following method to SkinBase.cs:

Code:

public bool IsPhoneOrder 
{
	get {
		bool result = false;
		if (m_AdminCustomer != null)
		{
			if (m_AdminCustomer.CustomerID != m_ThisCustomer.CustomerID)
			{
				result = true;
			}
		}
		return result;
	}
}

Then, within any .aspx page, you can simply use:

if (IsPhoneOrder) {
Do something specific to phone orders...
} else {
It's a regular page
}

**Use the code above at your own risk**
Adam

Thank you for this reply. I will give it a test and see if I can swap the "availability message" with the inventory number using your flag and conditional checks.

Thanks again!