Comments on: Magento – Adding Custom Shipping Comments at Checkout

By: Scott Greenlaw

Scott Greenlaw — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:19:37 +0000

Straight to the point and well written! Why can’t everyone else be like this?

By: Erwin Martling

Erwin Martling — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:02:34 +0000

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By: tmillhouse

tmillhouse — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 22:22:37 +0000

You’ll want to put the functions inside an Observer, which you configure in your config.xml. Your Observer can be called Observer.php and should extend Varien_Event_Observer. Something like this:

< ?php

class Company_Module_Model_Observer extends Varien_Event_Observer
{

With the above example, you're project folder heirarchy would look like app/code/local/Company/Module/Model/Observer.php

Then you'll have to wire the methods in config.xml tag.

If you have any more questions, I can be more specific.

By: Cedric

Cedric — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:51:11 +0000

Please excuse my newbiness. Where do i put the 2 functions? In a specific file?

By: Charlie Evans

Charlie Evans — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:01:49 +0000

Fantastic – thanks so much for your help. All working like a charm

By: tmillhouse

tmillhouse — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 11:37:31 +0000

Also, to see this in the admin panel, just identify the admin template that is printing out order data, and then just put $order->getShippingComment() wherever you’d like it to appear. Since the quote and order tables are flat, you can retrieve it using its magic getter method.

By: tmillhouse

tmillhouse — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 11:35:57 +0000

Hi Charlie, thanks for reading.

You are correct. You’ll want to add this column to the database. You can create a sql setup script (let me know if you’d like advise on how to set this up), and you could write something like this:

$installer->getConnection()->addColumn($installer->getTable(’sales/order’), ’shipping_comment’, ‘varchar(255)’);

After you have that on the database, once you set this value with either:
$order->setData(’shipping_comment’, $comment)

$order->setShippingComment($comment).

If you need to save this on both the quote and the order, I discovered a way to do this about a month ago. You can add the new column to both the sales/quote and sales/order tables, then in your observer code, you can just set it on the quote. Then, you can define the mapping strategy in your xml so that it will automatically get mapped to your order table once the order is processed. The configuration will look something like:

* …..

Let me know if you have any questions, we’re glad to help.

By: Charlie Evans

Charlie Evans — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 11:09:03 +0000

Thanks for the info – just what I was looking for.

I’ve added some logging to my test module and everything’s working from the session side of things, but I don’t think it’s saving anywhere to the database as I can’t see the comments on the order info page in admin..

Do I need to add a shipping_comment field to the database (sales_flat_order?) to store this comment?
And do I need to update my admin templates to display?

Any help much appreciated!

By: tmillhouse

tmillhouse — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:44:46 +0000

"To be determined" was added to the template file for that step of the checkout. The text area was added as well to support custom shipping rules from the user:

Let me know if you'd like more specific instructions, and I can update this article. We're glad to help.

By: Mark Guinn

Mark Guinn — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:15:24 +0000

Thanks for sharing this stuff. I was wondering how you set up the shipping on that site (Motion Savers) so that it displays TBD for shipping. Is that some default setting I’m missing, or a module you’re using? Thanks.