Zone rates - specific country not calculating postage

[robmurg]

Hi,
I hope someone can help me with this problem, I've tried for a couple of days to solve it on my own.
I use zone rates for shipping and have set up three zones as follows:
Zone 1 Countries
GB
Zone 2 Countries
ES,AT,BE,CH,CY,CZ,FI,FR, FX,DE,GI,GR,IE,IT,LU,MT,NO,NL,PL,PT,DK,SE,SI
(Note the ES at the start of that row)
Zone 3 Countries
US,CA,AT,GL,IS,IL,JP,AU,NZ,SG,TW,CN,HK,ZA

Most countries calculate their postage without problems, but when people from Spain (ES) try to order they are not quoted for postage and can't check out. Other countries in zone 2 seem to be OK.
I can't see the problem with Spain? It is set up as a country having zones in the zones table, but so is Germany for example and I can check out fine using a German (DE) address. I've hunted through the documentation and the forums and tried to see what is different about Spain in the database, but to no avail. I've tried 'ES' in various positions in the table above in case that was the problem, currently it's first in the list but does not work in the middle or the end either.
I'm running version 1.3.8 having recently upgraded from about 1.3.0 or so.
Thanks for any help you can offer on this.

[robmurg]

OK, been hacking all morning and think I understand the problem and have a solution which I present in case anyone else has the same problem or can see a flaw with it:

In the zones postage calculation there is a check to see if the customer's country is in a list where postage is not permitted:
if (strstr(MODULE_SHIPPING_ZONES_SKIPPED, $dest_country)) { ... don't offer postage ... }

In my shop the list was not initialised (and I can't see where to do that in the admin pages).
That meant it was comparing the country to the actual phrase MODULE_SHIPPING_ZONES_SKIPPED and matching on ES (in ZONES) and skipping shipping.

The MODULE_SHIPPING_ZONES_SKIPPED is a configuration constant so I added it to my configuration database table with an empty value for skipped countries, based on this line from the zones.php file:
$db->Execute("insert into " . TABLE_CONFIGURATION . " (configuration_title, configuration_key, configuration_value, c
onfiguration_description, configuration_group_id, sort_order, set_function, date_added) values ('Skip Countries, use a comm
a separated list of the two character ISO country codes', 'MODULE_SHIPPING_ZONES_SKIPPED', '', 'Disable for the following C
ountries:', '6', '0', 'zen_cfg_textarea(', now())");
and that seems to have done the trick. Maybe this is something I've messed up during the upgrade from my old shop 1.3.9?

[DrByte]

Good practice with all upgrades is to write down the settings for *all* your shipping and payment modules, then Uninstall them (click Remove in admin area), then re- Install them and set up the settings again. This results in setting up any missing parameters such as you describe.
This is generally mentioned in the upgrade documentation, but was probably not specifically mentioned for your module for the version you upgraded to simply because it applied to one of the interim upgrades.
Improvements are planned to help prevent this issue in the future, but until then, check all your activated modules similarly.

[MarkRS]

So is this configurable from the admin pages?
If so, where, please.

Regards
Mar

[robmurg]

I configured Zone rates by going to shipping in the modules menu and installing and configuring it if that's what you mean. The 'ES' problem involved opening up the database and adding the ZONE_RATES_SKIPPED entry manually which was a bit more involved. Dr Byte is suggesting that my problem could have been avoided if I'd un-installed zone rates before I upgraded from an older Zen-cart recently. That would have saved some bother!

[MarkRS]

The 'ES' problem involved opening up the database and adding the ZONE_RATES_SKIPPED entry manually which was a bit more involved.

Indeed, but that was my question, as indeed was asked by the previous person. So I'm assuming the answer is "No, from this point it's not configurable from the admin i/f".