AJAX

Recently, I have been working on pulling together an automated eBay listing generator for my cousin’s online store. He uses an ecommerce solution called OS Commerce. The package itself is alright. Its the same thing used on FCB Shelving, just with less customization.

Basically, what I have been trying to do is use AJAX to make a call to a script I wrote that goes through and pulls all relevant information about a product from the database, and parses additional files to extra information such as shipping, and returns.

The generator works as a three frame page, where the top has a selection box of products on the site (pulled from the database). When the user selections a product an request is sent to a php file that receives a product id as an argument.

The script then proceeds to pull the product name and description from the database. If the description has a tag for an image gallery, it then builds that gallery by parsing out the relevant location of the files.

Then, several of the OS Commerce language files are parsed (for whatever reason it saves all the language stuff in hard files rather than in the database). This gives the shipping and return policies as well as the conditions of use.

Finally, the script returns all the XHTML back to the page, which then dumps the code into a text area in another frame. This textarea is connected to the other frame that shows a live preview of the code. The code is editable on the fly after it has been rendered for any relevant changes that might need to be made.

All things considered, for a rough trial it came out pretty well.

After I polish it up after I get my cousin’s feedback I might post a link.