A solution (was Re: how to calculate shipping tax?)

[Kyle Hayes <kyle540@quicknet.net>]

The problem:

I was trying to figure out how to have sales tax applied when the buyer
was in California in the US, and not elsewhere in the world that might
have a state or region name abreviated to CA.  The standard sales tax
mechanism does not seem to allow triggering on two values instead of one.

My solution was to manually make one quantity on the checkout page with a
little perl script and then use that new quantity as the lookup key in the
salestax.asc database.

A Solution:

1. create a hidden field on the page (I called it 'sales_tax_region').

2. with a little perl script, fill in the value of that field.  This is
what my code looks like:

<INPUT .... NAME="sales_tax_region" VALUE="[value sales_tax_region]">

[perl values]
    $Safe{values}{sales_tax_region} = 
         $Safe{values}{country} . "_" .
         $Safe{values}{state};

    return "";
[/perl]

3. in the catalog.cfg file, change SalesTax to use this new field:

...
SalesTax  sales_tax_region
...

4. in salestax.asc, I have the following:

default 0
US_CA	0.0825

5. fire it off!

The one problem I found was that if the person reached the checkout page
and the default country was already the correct country, they wouldn't
change it and thus would not cause sales_tax_region to be filled.  My
thought on this is to default the country selection to a country that
doesn't exist (e.g. "Choose a Country").  That will force the user to
change the country and thus cause the field to be filled.  That will still
not catch all cases, but it should get closer.  Any thoughts on how to
make this happen?

My worry is that someone will choose the US.  That will force a page
submit and will reload everything.  However, if they haven't filled in the
state field yet, the sales_tax_region variable will not have the state in
it.  If they hit submit after filling in the state, there is no recalc
done on the page as far as I know.  Any help to get this problem solved
would be appreciated.

Best,
Kyle