osCommerce and Excel

[Guest]

Can osCommerce be configured to run with MS Excel. I have a mathamatical spread sheet done in Excel and I would like to be able to use this in my shopping cart. I will make it possible for clients to get real time quoats for customized work.

Pat

[MrPhil]

I think that would be awfully tough to do. First of all, you'd have to be running on a Windows (IIS) server, rather than the more common (and far better) Linux (Apache) server. Then, Excel normally runs interactively on Windows -- for server use it would have to be run non-interactively (in which case, how does it display values?). Maybe it can be done, but I couldn't guess how.

 

Why does it have to be a spreadsheet? Can't you take your equations and program them in PHP? Are you using some very exotic spreadsheet functions that you don't know how to replicate in a programming language? If so, that's not good (not understanding the formulas you're using). If you look around, I'm sure you could either find the equations behind these functions, or a library of canned PHP code that duplicates them.

 

You might also look around for a mod (contribution) to set a price figure based on various customer-selected inputs (you supply the guts of the code). That's another bridge to be crossed -- how to get arbitrary values into the calculator, rather than choosing from a limited set of product options. It might be best to set up a form somewhere to get the customer inputs, send them to a price module for processing, and get the price back to somewhere in osC to be put in the shopping cart (along with all the customer inputs). All in all, a major effort.

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. I have already started doing research on PHP functions and coding to help me work this out. Your right it does not have to be in Excel, it just needs to do the calculations and then insert the totals back into the oscommerce shopping cart for processing.

Par