After you take your ITPS New Order, you can make a call to any web server to do some intermediate processing before you respond to your customer. You have the option of configuring the call to your specified web program to use either a GET or a POST method, and to transmit either on port 80 (unsecure) or port 443 (SSL).  You can dynamically substitute your customer's information into the data that you send to the intermediate program using the double-bar substituion method.  If the call is successful, the body of the HTML response that comes back from the web program (or the text if the program returns plain text) is parsed and added to the list of available tags that you can use with double-bar substitution on your custom response page. If the call is unsuccessful, then a previously specified error message is made availble for double-bar substitution on your custom response page. An unsuccessful Additional Processing call does not affect the success of the ITPS order. The Additional Processing feature is driven by a protected database configuration, so information about your intermediate program call remains private.
 

Setting up a Destination for Additional Processing

In order to set up a call to an intermediate program on your New Orders, you will need to call your account team to request an ITPS Additional Processing implementation. The destination needs to be able to process a standard URL encoded string. You will need to provide the following information for your set up request:

Publication Description	The four character ItemCode used to uniquely identify the publication submitting transactions
host	The host that is hosting your intermediate program.  The server name needs to be preceeded by either the http or https protocol.  Do not append the trailing slash.  For example, http://www.neodata.com, or https://www.neodata.com are both valid host entries, if you wanted to call a program hosted on www.neodata.com.
method	Either "GET" or "POST"
cgifile	The absolute path to the program you are calling on your host.  It will begin with a slash.  For example: /cgi-bin/really_cool_extra_processing.cgi is a valid cgifile entry.
cgidata	The URL encoded string of data that you will send to your cgifile.  The format for a URL encoded string is tag=data&tag=data.  You may use the double-bar substitution method in this string to dynamically populate the data you are sending to your program.  For example:  customer_name=||fullname||&address=||streetadr||&user_email=||emailadr||  is a valid cgidata entry.  You will notice that the double-bar portions use ITPS tag names, or any html tag that you included on your New Order page. The tag names on the left of the equal sign will probably be specific to the program you are calling.  If you are calling a thrid party's program, you will need to get the instructions for submitting to that program in order to provide the correct tag names.  The Kable Internet Services staff is happy to assist with this process.
cgierr	A custom error message that you want to display to your customer's in the event that the program you are calling is unavailable or not responding.

You will receive the following information back from your account team when the implementation is complete:

cgiid

The number that the ITPS system will use to uniquely identify your Additional Processing call. You will use this number on your web page, enabling you to keep all the other information about your intermediate program  private.

Please allow two weeks for the configuration and testing of your Additional Processing call.