User Manual/Administration Interface/Service details

Basic details


There are some select and input fields in the left section of the detail view that are almost all required. Their purpose are:


 * Status (required) : Controls the visibility of the delivery or payment option. There are several status values available but the service will only be shown in the frontend if the status is "enabled".


 * Type (required) : The service type, which can be "Delivery" or "Payment". Depending on what you choose, the service will be shown in the delivery or payment screen in the frontend.


 * Code (required) : Unique code of the service that can be defined of your own.


 * Provider (required) : This is the last part of the service provider class name, e.g. "PrePay" for the "MShop_Service_Provider_Payment_PrePay". The name of the provider is case sensitive, so "prepay" is not the same as "PrePay"! Each provider can be enhanced by one or more decorators that must be added to the provider name and separated by a comma. To configure the "Manual" delivery provider in combination with e.g. a decorator called "Weight", enter "Manual,Weight" into the input field of the provider.


 * Label (required) : An internal label which helps you to identify the service and which can be used for searching in the administration interface. Usually, this is not used outside of the administration interface but if you don't add a translated name to that service, the label will be shown in the frontend.


 * Position (optional) : If there's more than one delivery or payment option the customer can choose from, the integer value in this input field affects its position.


 * Created (read-only) : Date and time when the entry was added. This value is set automatically.


 * Last modified (read-only) : Last date and time when the entry was edited. This value is set automatically.


 * Editor (read-only) : Last user who added or modified the entry. This value is set automatically.



Service configuration
The right side of the service detail view contains a key/value configuration panel where the necessary configuration values of the service and the decorators must be added. The left column in the configuration panel is for the configuration key, the right column for the value and at least the left column of each line must be filled with a valid key. You can add lines by clicking on the "Add" button in the menu bar and delete selected lines with the "Delete" button. The order of the lines doesn't matter.

Each service and decorator needs its own configuration. For the required resp. available configuration keys and values, please refer to the documentation of the service or decorator. Documentation for the built-in ones is available at the delivery/payment overview page.

Additional information
After entering the basic data for the delivery or payment, it may be important to add additional information like translated texts, pictures and prices. All additional information must be associated to the service.

Texts


Each text can have a maximum of 64 thousand bytes which equals 16-64 thousand characters depending on the size of the UTF-8 characters you use. To be most compatible with all platforms/operating systems/browsers, use only UTF-8 encoding. Besides plain text, you can also use HTML code for special markup.

To name and describe the service, two types of texts should be added for each language you want to provide on the website:


 * Name : A rather short text, that uniquely identifies the delivery or payment.


 * Short description : A view lines that shortly describes the delivery or payment and gives the customer information e.g. about limitations of the service.


 * Long description : This can contain all details about the delivery or payment that a customer may want to know. It's possible to add more than one long description if your text doesn't fit into one text item. In this case, the position of the item in the left section of the "Text" tab ("Associated Texts") matters.

The list type for all text items should be "default" as there's no distinction between between different types yet.



Media


Media items can be files of any type, from pictures over documents to audio files. Anything that can be stored in a file can be used in an (multi) media item. By default, the frontend will only display pictures with a list type of "default".

You may want to add at least the logo of logistic and payment providers that are well known. Logos should be rather small and in JPEG, PNG or GIF landscape format to make sure they can be displayed on all platforms and fit into the delivery or payment page.



Prices


Each delivery or payment item can have one price associated - even if the shipping or payment is for free. In this case, the price is displayed as 0.00.

Depending on the configured decorators, the price may be changed dynamically based on the rules the decorator implements.



Attributes


The service attribute panel is available for future uses but we found no case where we need it yet :-)



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