ePQA

The e-Commerce PQA Enhancer
from Stevens Creek Software


Introduction

ePQA is a PalmCall application designed to facilitate e-commerce from a Palm VII. It allows any PQA to be enhanced with the following features:

1) Selection of a customer from the built-in Address Book application, using "Intelliscroll" to allow tapping of letters of the alphabet to quickly skip to a section in the Address Book based on one of a dozen fields.

Search and display on more than a dozen fields:

2) Filling in one or more fields in the PQA form with information extracted from the Address Book entry. All fields (including custom fields, even renamed custom fields) can be extracted, as can the full name (combination of first and last name) and the full address (combination of address, city, state, and zip).

3) As an alternative to selecting a customer in general, AutoFill of information from the Business Card entry (i .e., personal information) or from a another "pre-selected" entry.

4) Credit card entry and/or validation (validation means verifying that the numbers satisfy the appropriate check sum algorithms imposed on credit cards, not that the card is actually valid!).


5) Adding items and prices to a PQA order form from a catalog of thousands of items (requires Take An Order! software).

6) Printing of information returned to the PQA as a web clipping, such as a credit card receipt for a transaction that has just been authorized on the web (requires PalmPrint software).

7) Transfer of information returned to the PQA to the Memo Pad.

Installation

ePQA.prc is a standard Palm application, installed into the Palm VII using standard installation tools.

Writing a PQA to use ePQA

The sample software distribution includes a file epqademo.htm which demonstrates a sample order form written to take advantage of ePQA. The key lines of this file are these:

<A HREF="palmcall:SCsv.appl?Select&Full Name&E-mail&Address&City&State&Zip Code&Skip" BUTTON>Select Customer</A>

<A HREF="palmcall:SCsv.appl?Select Card&Full Name&E-mail&Address&City&State&Zip Code&Skip" BUTTON>AutoFill Self</A>

<A HREF="palmcall:SCsv.appl?Full Name&E-mail&Address&City&State&Zip Code" BUTTON>AutoFill Other</A>

<A HREF="palmcall:SCsv.appl?Skip19&CCInput" BUTTON>Input Credit Card</A>

The first of these two lines demonstrates calling ePQA (creator ID SCsv), selecting a customer, and extracting information to fill in a form, the second set of two lines does the same thing but extracting the information from the user's "Business Card" rather than allowing selection of a customer in general, the third extracts information from a "pre-selected" card other than the business card, and the fourth fragment demonstrates calling ePQA to enter and validate a credit card number. The key to ePQA is that it will parse arguments (one or more, separated by ampersands &) passed to it and take appropriate actions. The potential arguments are as follows:

Unlike the standard Address Book application, the first (search) field can be more than a dozen choices - Name, Company, Address, City/State, Zip Code, Work Phone, Home Phone, Fax, E-mail, or Custom 1 through 4. Furthermore, the user also has full control over the second display column (with the same set of 13 choices), to help in selecting the right name from the list.

This same screen can be called up directly by a user by tapping on the ePQA application itself. This "pre-selects" a name from the list, so now a PQA can be written in which the user simply taps an "Autofill" button and sees the information filled in, without the necessity to go through the selection process each time.

To verify that the dsired customer is being chosen, the user can also "double-tap" on a name on the list to see a "full detail" display:

Writing a CGI script to allow printing or memo creation via ePQA

The sample software distribution includes a file epqademo.cgi which demonstrates how to write a CGI script to take advantage of the printing capability of ePQA. The key lines of this file are these:

print '<CENTER><A HREF="palmcall:SCsv.appl?Print" BUTTON>Print</A>';
print '<A HREF="palmcall:SCsv.appl?Memo" BUTTON>Create Memo</A></CENTER>';
print '<FORM ACTION="default.cgi" METHOD="POST" ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">';
print '<TEXTAREA NAME="Output" ROWS="11" COLS="32">';
print "The information you provided was:\r";
...
print "</TEXTAREA><BR>";

The first line creates a button labelled "Print" which will call ePQA with the "Print" command. The second line creates a button labelled "Create Memo" which will call ePQA with the "Memo" command. The signficance of the remaining lines is that the print functionality of ePQA requires that all data to be printed (or transferred to a memo) is contained in a single Palm "field", which in CGI terms becomes a single "TEXTAREA" inside a form (in cases where this isn't possible, PQA results can still be printed using PalmPrint, but they require a multistep process - selecting "Copy Page" from the PQA Edit Menu, switching to the PalmPrint application, and tapping "Print Clipboard." This is not only a multistep process, but of course is also subject to the clipboard 1000-character limit.)

Note that this CGI script is actually active on the Web at http://www.stevenscreek.com/palm/epqademo.cgi, so that test PQAs can be written and tested by referencing that URL (as does the sample PQA, epqademo.pqa).

Using the sample software to demonstrate functionality

  1. Install epqademo.pqa and epqa.prc in the Palm VII. If printing is to be taken advantage of, install PalmPrint or SCS Print Server as well. If catalog searching is to be taken advantage of, install Take An Order! as well (PalmPrint, SCS Print Server, and Take An Order! can all be downloaded in trial versions, as well as purchased, at www.stevenscreek.com).
  2. Run PalmPrint and configure the software for the printer to be used for the test. Likewise for Take An Order! if that is to be used.
  3. Run the ePQA Demo application. This will display a blank form to be filled out to order software items from Stevens Creek Software. The form can be filled out by hand, but of course that defeats the purpose of the test.
  4. Tap on the "Select Customer" button. A view of the Address Book is displayed. Select a name.
  5. Tap on OK. When the PQA reappears, the relevant fields will be filled in.
  6. As an alternative to the previous two steps, simply tap on the "AutoFill Self" button and the information will be extracted from the Business Card in the Address Book (assuming one has been designated).
  7. As an additional alternative, before running the PQA, tap on ePQA itself, and select a customer. Now, in the ePQA demo, tap on "Autofill Other" and the information from that name will be filled in.
  8. If you have installed Take An Order!, tap on "Add" to add an item to the order; if not, you can fill in the name and price of an item "by hand."
  9. Tap on "Enter CC" to enter a credit card. For purposes of this test, you can enter "4444111122223333" which is a valid number, or, to see the test fail, "4444111122223334."
  10. Tap Submit Order. This will go over the air to the Stevens Creek web site and go through the motions of placing an order (no order will actually be placed, and no actual credit card authorization will occur).
  11. You will receive a (bogus) order acknowledgement on the screen - "Thank you for your order, etc.".
  12. Tap the "Create Memo" button and the acknowledgement will be automatically transferred to a memo in the MemoPad (you can check this after doing the next step).
  13. Tap the "Print" button which appears, point the unit at the printer, and voila! the receipt will be printed, complete with a signature line, ready for the customer to sign.

ePQA is a trademark of Stevens Creek Software. PalmPrint is a registered trademark of the 3Com Corporation or its subsidiaries, used by Stevens Creek Software under express license.