Fields not showing up on Booking CSV Export

[Cindy Fry]

I have checked all the field choices (after I select “Export Bookings”), but the resulting csv file doesn’t contain all of the fields from the booking form.

I think that the “Manage Bookings” function can use some better reporting features:

1. First, it would be better to have a drop-down to select which
   booking you would like to see, instead of a text box where we have to
   enter the title

2. It would also be great if you could click on the event, and a page
   would open that has an overview of the event: how many people
   booked, how many are confirmed, how many are pending, etc. It’s a
   pain to have to download a csv every time, when all the info is in
   the plugin database.

Thanks for your help on the first subject, and thanks for a great plugin!!

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Cindy,

Which fields do not appear (that you selected)?

Thank you for your suggestions, just to respond to them:

1) Sites can have a lot of bookings (not unreasonably in the region of thousends or tens of thousands). It obviously varies wildly according to the nature of the site, and how long its been running – but this means a drop-down is not feasible. For the booking search, you don’t have to enter the title, just a hash tag and the booking ID, or the user’s name / e-mail to search for a booking. There is an event filter, to select an event to filter by you can simply start typing its name and it’ll search for the event. Again a drop-down wouldn’t be feasible here has some sites might have hundreds or thousands of events.

2). That’s a great idea, and I think would be helpful addition. If it’s just quick overview of numbers for an event you can filter the bookings admin screen by event / date (using the aforementioned filter or clicking an event / date in the bookings table). The status at the top of the bookings table should then give you an indication of the number of bookings, the number of bookings in each status and the number of (confirmed) attendees.

Hope that helps!

[Cindy Fry]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your reply.

First, on the Bookings Export, it appears that the fields that are not being exported in the CSV file (even though they ARE in the “Select booking fields to be included in export”) are all the fields within the “Fieldset”.

Which brings up a question: I don’t see the purpose of the “Fieldset” choice. I add fields to the fieldset (they should be under & indented, correct?), and then add another Fieldset at the bottom of the list, but I fail to see anything that sets them apart in the Booking form. There is not a border around them, nor do they appear any different than any of the other fields on the form. Am I doing something wrong?

On the Drop-down question, I just found out that if I click on one of the titles of a booking, it sorts the list to give me only that Event’s bookings. Didn’t realize that. Sorry for the confusion, as that works very well.

And on the Bookings Overview page, I see what you mean about the “No confirmed attendees / 4 Bookings” listing at the top right of the list. That’s a good way to get a quick view. But it still would be great if there was just a page that gave an overall of the Attendees / Bookings / Pending / list of names of attendees. Maybe this could be something that could be turned on or off in the Admin section, for those that might have thousands of attendees, but for those of us that would have less than 50, this would be a great tool.

Thanks for your help – and still thing this is the most comprehensive plugin out there!! Great work!

Cindy

[Stephen Harris]

Thanks, I’ll look into that for you.

I add fields to the fieldset (they should be under & indented, correct?),

Yes – in the booking form customiser fields added inside a fieldset are denoted by being indentended and immediately beneath that fieldset.

There is not a border around them, nor do they appear any different than any of the other fields on the form. Am I doing something wrong?

I’m afraid styling will depend on the theme in use. You could always add styling with a few lines of CSS to your theme’s style.css:

fieldset.eo-booking-field-fieldset {
      border: 1px solid #c0c0c0;
      margin: 0 2px;
      padding: 0.35em 0.625em 0.75em;
}

Glad to hear the plug-in is working well for you – I’ll definitely take the feedback regarding a summary page on board.

[Cindy Fry]

Thanks Stephen, I think I get what you say about the fieldset. But can you tell me the purpose intended (by you) for the fieldset item? I mean, what is it supposed to do or look like?

Also, I just setup the Paypal function, and tried it the first time, and got the message:

“The seller accepts encrypted website payments only. You cannot pay the seller through un-encrypted buttons. Please contact your seller for more details.”

Does the form send the payments un-encrypted? Is that normal? How should I correct this issue?

Thanks again,
Cindy

[Cindy Fry]

Sorry, here was the other half of the Paypal response:

The seller accepts encrypted website payments only. You cannot pay the seller through un-encrypted buttons. Please contact your seller for more details.

thanks.

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Cindy,

Communication with PayPal standard is not encrypted, the user is taken to PayPal to pay, and PayPal separately sends a payment notification which the plugin validates.

You can enable non-encrypted payments by following these instructions: http://stackoverflow.com/a/20144997

Alternatively I can provide PayPal Express Checkout gateway but this requires a Premium or Business PayPal account.

[Cindy Fry]

Hi Stephen, thanks for the reply.

Funny, I have never gotten this message with any of the other Paypal payments I’ve set up on different websites. This is the first time. And I’ve always used standard Paypal.

I don’t think it’s ethical – to our clients – for us to turn off encryption on our Paypal account.

This doesn’t sound “normal”.

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Cindy,

It’s actually fairly unusual to have the option enabled – in over 2 years of Pro, this is the first reported instance of such an error message.

As far as I’m aware “encrypted payments” actually means encrypting the HTML form which posts to PayPal. Typically a form which redirects to PayPal will have some, usually hidden, values indicating how much to charge the user, and a user could edit those values to reduce that amount. Encryption can stop that tampering, however in this case the plug-in is redirecting the user from the server rather than from a client-side form. That is, there is no opportunity for a user to try and change the amount they are charged.

The advice to turn off the blocking of non-encrypted payments is industry standard, but if you prefer I can provide you with an extension for PayPal’s Express Checkout gateway. I do not know if PayPal will block such payments if non-encrypted payments are being blocked – because that is intended for PayPal buttons rather than Express Checkout, but it does require API credentials to generate a token which the user is then directed to PayPal with. Payment is then authorised by your site and confirmed immediately rather than waiting for an IPN.

[Cindy Fry]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your detailed reply.

So, as I’m understanding it, Paypal is saying that the form we’re sending them is not encrypted, and this has nothing to do with encrypting the credit card transaction, since that happens on Paypals site.

Is that correct?

Thanks

[Stephen Harris]

Yes, that’s correct. Credit card transactions will happen on PayPal and no card details are communicated between PayPal and your site.

[Cindy Fry]

Perfect. Thanks for walking us through this, Stephen. You do great customer service!!!

Take care!

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