Extra Information Per-Product in Orders

[Guest]

I need to add fields to the product list in the admin Orders area so that gift certificate numbers can entered where appropriate. I tried putting in a field and having its value pulled from $HTTP_POST_VARS to be inserted in the database, but nothing happened. After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that $HTTP_POST_VARS is behaving as though it's empty. If I try to echo it in its entirety or as single values from it, nothing appears. The strange thing is this - I'm using the XML UPS Tracking contribution, which uses $HTTP_POST_VARS to see what tracking number was entered, and it's working perfectly. It's able to pull a value from $HTTP_POST_VARS('ups_track_num') and put that value into the database correctly, but if I try to echo $HTTP_POST_VARS('ups_track_num') anywhere else, it comes up empty. Has anyone run into behavior like this? More importantly, has anyone fixed it?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Aaron