automatically generated emails

[maatter]

Dear zencart Team,

i am currently using your shopsystem for my company. As I have no idea about programming I am employing a guy to to do some design changes for in it for me. Yesterday I just wanted him to change the order confirmation email "billing address"-section to just write "Name:" in front of the customer name, "Street:" in front of the the street and so on. But the programmer told me that in order to do this he would have to change the "sourcecode", which would cause problems due to "side effects" and that a change like this would be overrided by the next upgrade and so on. Bottomline was, that this chgange that I requested is difficult and dangerous to implement. As Im having the feeling that this guy is telling me rubbish, I would like to know if he is right or not.

thanks for your advise

mm

[schoolboy]

Technically, your programmer is correct. In order to strip in "labels" for each line as you'd like, the source code would have to be changed, because the data is stripped into the email as a "block". In other words, the data is not stripped in line-by-line in the case of the billing name and address but, (as I said), as a block of text, the components of which are compiled by source code elsewhere in the program).

If it were simply a case of stripping in the text data line-by-line, then the solution would be relatively simple, as the "labels" you are keen to insert could be hard-coded (typed into) the e-mail template.

It is also likely that any changes to the source code would be vulnerable to upgrades - depending on the files that were edited. Files that were edited outside of what we call the Template Over-rides system would definitely be affected by a future upgrade.

To comment on how "dangerous" this process may be, someone with greater knowledge of the source code than me would need to comment.

One thing I can say is that it will be a finicky process, and may need an "experienced" knowledge of Zencart's programming structure.

Perhaps one of these "experienced" zen programmers could comment further?