Checkout Attributes in Expressions

In certain scenarios, you may want to look at Checkout Attributes to do some conditional processing.  For example, your shipping carrier might charge extra to ship to a residential address.  You could just add a Price adjustment to the Attribute Value, however there are some drawbacks to that:

1) The Price Adjustment shows up in the sub total area as an itemized item.  You may want it to just be included right in the shipping rate, and/or you may not want your customer to know what the surcharge is.

2) You can't apply it conditionally - e.g. don't want to include it for customers with certain roles.

3) You can't calculate the surcharge value (the price adjustment is fixed)

Older versions of Shipping Director required that you use  XML parsing via SelectSingleNode().  As of version 1.07 Shipping Director has the following built in variables (and Payment Director too):

$CheckoutAttributeValues

$CheckoutAttributeLocalizedValues

These are variables that contain the checkout attributes returned as a String of concatenated name:value pairs (colon separator).  Each pair is terminated with "|".

For our residential address example, we would set up a checkout attribute named "Shipping Address Type" using control type "radio button list", and we would add two Attribute Values: Residential Address and Commercial Address

Then, this could be used in the Option's Surcharge Expression:

   ([$CheckoutAttributeValues].Contains("Shipping Address Type:Residential Address") ? [Fedex Residential Surcharge] : 0)

(The decimal variable [Fedex Residential Surcharge] would be declared beforehand)