Rentals in inventory control?

[AlChuck]

A look at the documentation seems to suggest that if I have rental products in my store, all I need to do is create a pair of Order Status Options, e.g. "Shipped (rental)" and "Returned (rental)," and configure the Inventory Control to do the right thing to the inventory numbers for the product when its status is set - that is, decrement the rental item inventory by one when the order is set to "Shipped (rental)," and increment it when it reaches the "Returned (rental)" status.

Sound right?

Anyone doing this on their Squirrel store?

Thanks...
Alan

[Jamie]

Stock is reduced when an item is added to the cart. It is restocked when the cart is emptied, the order is abandoned, or when you assign any status that triggers restocking based on your inventory control settings.

[AlChuck]

This is a follow-up to my earlier question about rentals and inventory controls. Is there a way to have the approach of the expiration of the agreed rental period (30 days, for example) for an item trigger the sending of an email to the store administrator? I'm thinking perhaps creating a rule where if the status is Rental (shipped), and the date that status was set is 28 days ago, have SquirrelCart send a notification email to the store admin... and maybe another to the customer as a sourtesy reminder?

[Jamie]

We don't have a feature that can do that. It would require custom programming.

[AlChuck]

Oh, well... thanks, Jamie...

[AlChuck]

I tried to write myself a little PHP page that would query for the rental orders that are older than 30 days... however, all I get is

Access denied for user

when it attempts the mysql_connect function...

However, I can connect to the store database through PHPMyAdmin just fine.

Is the squirrelcart code preventing any attempt from a connection made from code outside the squirrelcart directory and from PHPMyAdmin? Or am I doing something boneheaded?

[Jamie]

Is the squirrelcart code preventing any attempt from a connection made from code outside the squirrelcart directory and from PHPMyAdmin?

No. That would actually be impossible.

You can easily connect to the database by including the 'squirrelcart/pre_common.php' file. Drop a file like this in the same location as your squirrelcart folder:

test.php

<?php 
include 'squirrelcart/pre_common.php';

if (!security_level('Store Admin')) die "You must login to use this page.";

$products = sc_query('SELECT `Name` FROM `Products` LIMIT 0,10', MYSQL_ASSOC, 1);
sc_print_array($products);
?>

Load it in your browser. It will connect to your database and display 10 products.

[AlChuck]

Excellent, thank you!