Desktop Consulting Service (DCS) Weblog

I was recently contacted by a client who was having problems with their PayPal shopping cart functionality. The shopping cart has been in place since 2002 and never had any previous problems.

So, I visited their website and tried adding an item to the cart and immediately received an error message :

Sorry - your last action could not be completed

If you were making a purchase or sending money, we recommend that you check both your PayPal account and your email for a transaction confirmation after 30 minutes.

If you came to this page from another website, please return to that site (don’t use your browser’s Back button) and restart your activity.

If you came from PayPal’s website, click the PayPal logo in the upper left corner

I googled the error message and popped quite a few results.  After wading through 3 or 4 pages,  only two possible issues were discussed: Outdated account information and a problem with PayPal cart buttons in frames.

The cart coding is not in an HTML frame so I dismissed the latter.  And after checking with my client, the account was verified as being up-to-date.

So, using my old telecomm maintenance skills (go where someone has gone before),  I reviewed the coding in the product HTML page.  It all seemed correct and was coded according to PayPal’s published HTML Guidelines. PayPal did add a new way of creating buttons in 2007, but the prior method was still valid.

Just to be sure,  I creating the new style button code and inserted it into a test page.   The new button failed as soon as I appended the override variables needed for product amount and custom shipping cost.   Backtracking to the original code, I tried commenting out each advanced variable and testing the result.

Woo-hoo!

The problem was solved when commenting out this line :

<input type=”hidden” name=”upload” value=”1″>

Apparently, PayPal deprecated the use of that tag for it’s own internal cart.  Looking in more detail at the HTML guidelines for advanced variables,  you’ll notice that line is no longer included.   The code line is only used for 3rd party shopping carts.  Unfortunately, I ran into it by trial and error and thankfully, my client’s customer reported it instead of just moving on down the road.

Anyway, if you encounter this problem in your website, check these items:

• Verify your seller account is completely up to date.
• If using a PayPal “Add To Cart” button (and underlying HTML variables) in a frame,  change it to a top level page.
• If using advanced variables, ensure you are not using the upload variable for posting to the PayPal internal shopping cart.
• If you don’t need to override any variables and you have a static product line, use the Create Button functionality for Website Payments Standard.

If all else fails, contact PayPal support or post to the PayPal Developer Boards.

If you’re lucky, all of your charts will be managed in Excel.  If you have the unhappy task of dealing with them in Access, may the force be with you.

I recently took on several complicated chart tasks, and after 8 bruising (non-billable!) hours, managed to coax Access to properly display the data.  But, next time, I’ll be using the Excel object to manage task intensive charts.

In any case, one small annoyance is the y-axis title.  On some operating systems (To remain mysterious as always….Windows XP) the y-axis title gets cut-off, despite any font type or size manipulation.  There is no known solution.  But I did trick it to show my whole label text.

At the end of the label, add a space or two, and then a period. When the chart is rendered, the space and the period are cut-off due to the anomaly, but the full caption is visible.  You may have to experiment a bit to get the results you want.

Software development for fun and profit, that’s the life for me.