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Shipping Cost Database

The shipping cost database (located in ProductDir/shipping.asc) is a tab-separated ASCII file with six fields -- code, text description, criteria (quantity or weight, for example), minimum number, maximum number, and cost. None of the fields are case-sensitive.

If you want to define the shipping database in your catalog configuration file, set the Variable MV_SHIPPING to what would be its contents.

To set the file to be something other than shipping.asc in the products directory, set the Special directive:

    Special  shipping.asc  /home/user/somewhere/shipping_defs

There are two styles of setting, which can be mixed in the same file. The first is line-based, and expects 6 or more TAB-separated fields. They would look like:

default No shipping weight 0 99999999 0

upsg UPS Ground weight 0 0 e Nothing to ship! upsg UPS Ground weight 0 150 u Ground [default zip 98366] 3.00 upsg UPS Ground weight 150 999999 e @@TOTAL@@ lbs too heavy for UPS

The second is a freeform method, with a mode: Description text introducing the mode line, and the special encoding called out by indented parameters. The below is identical to the above:

    upsg: UPS Ground
        criteria    weight
        min         0
        max         0
        cost        e Nothing to ship!
        
        min         0
        max         150
        cost        u
        table       2ndDayAir
        geo         zip
        default_geo 98366
        adder       3

        min         150
        max         999999
        cost        e @@TOTAL@@ lbs too heavy for UPS

The second format has several advantages. You can span multiple lines with the <<HERE document format, like so:

    upsg: UPS Ground
        criteria    <<EOF
    [perl]
        return 'weight' if $Values->{country} eq 'US';
        return 'weight' if ! $Values->{country};
        # Return blank, don't want UPS
        return '';
    [/perl]
    EOF
    
The defineable fields are, in order for the tab-separated format:

MODE

The unique identifier for that shipping method. It may be repeated as many times as needed.

DESCRIPTION

Text to describe the method (can be accessed on a page with the [shipping-description] element).

CRITERIA

Whether shipping is based on weight, quantity, price, etc. Valid MiniVend tags can be placed in the field to do a dynamic lookup -- if a number is returned, that is used as the accumulated criteria -- that is, the total of weight, quantity, or price as applied to all items in the shopping cart.

See Criteria Determination below.

MINIMUM

The low bound of quantity/weight/criteria this entry applies to.

MAXIMUM

The high bound of quantity/weight/criteria this entry applies to. The first found entry is used in case of ties.

COST

The method of developing cost. It can be a number which will be used directly as the shipping cost, or a function, determined by a single character at the beginning of the field:

   f       Formula (MML tags OK, evaluated as Perl)
   x       Multiplied by a number
   [uA-Z]  UPS-style lookup
   m       MiniVend chained cost lookup (all items summed together)
   i       MiniVend chained cost lookup (items summed individually)

NEXT

The next field supplies an alternative shipping mode to substitute if the cost of the current one is zero.

ZONE

The UPS zone that is being defined.

QUERY

MiniVend tags which will return a SQL query to select lines matching this specification. The current mode is replaced with this selection. If there is a query parameter of ?, it will be replaced with the mode name.

QUAL

The geographic qualification (if any) for this mode.

PERL

Perl code that is read and determines the criterion, not the cost. Use the cost option with ``f '' as the prelim to supply Perl code to determine cost.

TOTAL

Set to the accumulated criterion before passing to Perl.

OPT

Used to maintain UPS and freeform options. Normally these are set by separate lines in the shipping definition.

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