I have an order form issue that is totally stumping me. I need to collect more information than is accepted by my gateways's order.pl script.
I'll try to be as brief and concise as possible in describing my issue and my needs.
The gateways' order.pl script only accepts three variables, and they must be passed as written
ItemDesc, ItemQty and ItemCost. They allow for user defined variables as long as they are passed as userVar1 and so on.
The form I am putting together is multi part..first my customer selects their package ( a-d ), then they are sent to step 2 where they choose the design for the package, once they choose the design they are asked to choose their school colors. I am stuck writing all these in as userVar# and so on, with hidden fields that pass the description along. Not fun as it requires more effort than I wanted to spend on this form as there are better things to do with my website and my time.
In reality, the only things the gateway needs to send us are what they customer ordered and if the transaction was approved. I was thinking of trying to post to two scripts ? One that collects the information we need to print the shirts and one that passes the order variables to our gateway. Or even if we can grab all the info and just pass to the gateway for credit card processing ?
This is where I am stumped as I think I need to work with PHP and am clueless with PHP, noob doesnt even describe my level of ignorance regarding that.
I am also stumped on passing the info gathered in each part of the multi part form to the next so that everything is passed either as a string or ??? I think that has to do with javascript and cookies, and if thats the case I know enough about javascript to figure that out on my own...
So, I guess my question here boils down to : Is there a way to ( on one form ) collect all the information, send the customer information ( sizes, quantities, colors, name to place on shirt, etc ) to us for order fulfillment and then just send the other remaining info ( item desc, item cost and item qty ) to our gateway for processing ?
I am so stumped its not even funny and if there is anyone that can provide any sort of assistance I would be forever grateful !
Thanks in advance !

How does the data get sent to your order fulfillment? If it is a form that the user submits to the order-fulfillment site (as I expect it is), then you have two choices: You can include all the details in the information sent to the order-fulfillment site, or you can collect the customer information, and then let the customer submit the payment information to the order-fulfillment site later.

It sounds like you're doing the first option now. If you switch to the second option, then you'll need some way to verify that the order information you received corresponds with a specific paid order as reported by the order-fulfillment site.

My form action is https://www.eProcessingNetwork.com/cgi-bin/wo/order.pl and the method ( obviously ) is post. Since their order.pl script only accepts certain predefined variables, anything else I collect in that form just doesnt show up on the order. If the information isnt given the values : userVar, ItemDesc, ItemCost or ItemQty, it doesnt show up on the email we recieve when the order is placed. Like for example the team members name. The customer can enter a name for each package they order and while I can throw togther a way to recieve the package, size, color, quantity and whatnot, I cant figure out how to recieve the name they type in. I know we'll recieve the order information, just cant figure the name part out. Thats why I wondered if I could post the form results to two different places, that way my customer only has to click one submit button, the gateway does its thing and we still recieve the info the gateway doesnt pass.
I only hope I made sense there, I know the exact issue, just due to my limited understanding of the process I dont know how to relate it.

Please see the FAQ entry Can I have two or more actions in the same form?

Another approach would be to have the order sequence generate one last form that is submitted to the order.pl script. This last form could encode all the information into a complex ItemDesc, or into a complex userVar.