Blog posts tagged with 'Attributes'

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)

Previously in this blog Exclude Shipping Methods by Specification Attribute we discussed checking a Product Specification Attribute.  The scenario was that if a product required assembly, that it could not be picked up in the store.

In this blog, we'll look at how to examine a Product Attribute.  (Product Attributes are actually Product Variant Attributes).    For example, let's say our "Assembled" attribute is something the customer chooses at the time of adding an item to a cart; they can choose a value of "Yes", or "No".   NopCommerce stores customer attribute choices in the shopping cart item's AttributeXml field.  However, we don't have to parse the XML - this field is a string, and we can just look for the correct <Value> tag in the string using the Contains() function.  Here's what a typical AttributeXml looks like for a product variant having only a single attribute  (I've added spacing and linefeeds for readability):

<Attributes>
     <ProductVariantAttribute ID="1">
         <ProductVariantAttributeValue><Value>1</Value></ProductVariantAttributeValue>
     </ProductVariantAttribute>
</Attributes>

It's that <ProductVariantAttributeValue><Value>1</Value> we are looking for - that number "1" in the value tag is the unique Id of the attribute value in the database table (just <Value>1</Value> would be enough, but I'll also include the parent tag to make it clear)

We'll use the same scenatio we did last time - Always offer Fedex, and only offer In-Store pickup if item does NOT require assembly (the leading "!" is the NOT operator).  Here we go...

Yep, that's it!  You will, however, have to find the correct Value Id.  To do that, either check in the database - e.g:

or, you can use Shipping Director to just dump out the AttributeXml to examine.  Set up this record:

Then, put an item with desired selection in the cart and Estimate Shipping.

[Update 9/2014  - note that as of nopCommerce 3.0, there is no longer a ProductVariant, so just delete "ProductVariant." from any expression below]

You can have shipping calculations based on the product specification attributes of items in the cart.
As an example, let's exclude a shipping method if the "Assembled" specification attribute option is applied to any item in the cart:
We have configured a Specification Attribute "Assembly" having only a single option "Assembled", and we want to hide shipping option "In-Store Pickup" if any items in the cart have the "Assembled" specification attribute option.

Here how it looks if you're using an carrier rate calculation method like Fedex.  The first Option record is an "In-Store Pickup" defined in SD and will appear with $0 only if no products in the cart have "Assembled" attribute.
(We'll use a Reference as a shortcut to get the specification attributes to make it more readable):

Here how it looks if you're using an internal rate calculation method like ByWeight, and defined a Shipping Method "In-Store Pickup" in Admin > Configuration > Shipping > Shipping Methods:

When Shipping Director processes the Option record, the Name Expression is computed for each shipping method option returned by the Shipping.Weight plugin (e.g. "In-Store Pickup", "Ground", "Air", etc.).

When a plugin returns multiple shipping options, calculating a specific Name Expression to blank will suppress that option. (the ternary opertator " ? : " acts like an if-then-else)

For the SpecificationAttributeOption in the above example, if you want to use the Id rather than the Name (e.g. your Name is localized, or it it might be changing in future), then be sure to check the SQL database table [SpecificationAttributeOption] to get the correct Id:
   ... .Any(SpecificationAttributeOption.Id = 1) ...

If you've localized your shipping methods names (i.e. created a language resource with Resource Name = "In-Store Pickup"), then be sure to use SD's GetLocaleString() function (must be assigned to a string variable) to get the localized name for use in the expression above:

Then in the Option record, reference the variable : ... $Name = [In-Store Pickup Text] and Items.Any(...

(P.S.  If you ever need to check the Attribute rather than an AttributeOption, then use SpecificationAttributeOption.SpecificationAttribute.Name .  For example, above we said we have a Specification Attribute "Assembly" having only a single option "Assembled".  But it could also have had two options: "Assembled" and "Not Assembled".  If we didn't care which option, but just that it had the "Assembly" Attribute, then we'd use SpecificationAttributeOption.SpecificationAttribute.Name = "Assembly".)