This is very frustrating. Two people paid for subscriptions today and they never got the access.

I can see the payment in paypal along with the order details, but they do not have a role or receipt on my web site.

[RANT]

Forgive me for sounding short, but this module needs an overhaul.

First it needs a landing page to tell users what to do if they do not have access right away.

Second, it need a reliable and simple reporting mechanism. I got three subscriptions so far today. If I run a report from 9/6/2007 to 10/6/2007 if finds no one. If I use 10/7 as my end date it finds the one receipt. I think a less than OR equal is in order somewhere.

How do I see unsuccessful attempts? There are entries in the OrderItem and orderTables for the unprocessed (ie. no receipt) ones.

Third, The details sent to Paypal should have the username in the description OR the email address used on the site. Many people have a diff email for paypal and some sites like mine encourage the use of nicknames or handles. DNN doesn't have an option to look up by userid (that I could find anyway) making it almost a useless bit of information incases where you need to investigate things.

Fourth, it would be nice to have the ability to correct the failures of the module by manually completing the order via a nice list.

Fifth, I have tried my best to get under the hood, but the schema for the data is terrible. Theres an OrderItem which has the exact same ID as the Orders table yet it's some kind of linking table to what? I see the planID in there. The recepits table has no link back to the order or orderitem table at all. so they must be linked via userid but if a user subscribes more than once there is no way to see which recepit belongs to which order.. or is there some method to what I see as madness?

[/RANT]

now I feel better.

1) For me it would be good enough but often people don't read it fully. Ideally, it would be best to redirect to a page that has further instructions and info. What happens when people pay for a role and then don't see it immediately is they contact paypal and open a dispute.Most of the time it's matter of them logging out and back in to get their role in effect. Sometimes however they pay and just never get the role assigned. I don't know the steps to make this happen. When this does happen, there is no easy way for me to resolve the situation. I have to spend time reverse looking up their username via the paypal item description. this involves looking at the raw data via sql query etc..

2) OK. I see how the ORDER and ORDERITEM table are used. IMO, it's a big mistake not to link ORDERS to a reciept. You should always have a receipt but the status would start at "Order" or something to indicate it has not completed yet. Why not also make a text field to store the text receipt that gets sent to the user for an archive of the exact order details.

3) yes! having the username in the orderid string sent to paypal would be a great thing. and make it a snap to look up users.

4) I know you would not want to complete orders that were not paid, but by the same token I would prefer to complete the orders that for whatever reason, did pay but did not get completed as in my scenario. Now I have two users I manually gave roles to but no receipt to record the fact. In concert with #2 above, it would be great to have a simple list of the "orders" with a button to complete the order. So in my scenario, I could have just looked at incomeplete orders and clicked a button to comeplete them. You could even flag such recepts as "Manually Completed" to differentiate them for the ones that worked.

5) understood.

I will try to fond out more details. The only correlation I know of between the two failures yesterday is that they were both non US. One of them appears to have two ORDER records, the first one appears to be the one that paypal actually charged. Maybe he clicked the button twice and it failed to connect back to the role assignment?

Scott,

When a payment has been successfull but the user has a 'strange' character in the name they use in their Paypal profile like á or Ö the role will not be updated nor will there will be an entry in the receipts table.

Good to see we found the problem. Scott, I hope you can fix this. It caused major headaches when I was on holiday last summer and one user did not get access...