Entries tagged repat

Quick and dirty redirect script for the fitting shipping provider

Posted on 2. März 2017 Comments

Another way to use the PHP library shipping-service-provider-check apart from fixing the shipping providers in the ERP Plentymarkets is a simple quick and dirty PHP script that redirects to the tracking page of a fitting shipping provider. You can find the whole sourcecode on GitHub.

Installation

If you don’t use some sort of MVC this is a quick way to do it. If you do, I suspect you’ll know how to alter this example to fit your system. Feel free to write me an e-mail or comment if you need help

  1. Log onto your server and create a folder
  2. Copy or git pull the files, including .htaccess
  3. Get Composer
  4. composer require repat/shipping-service-provider-check

Explanation of the code

The $trackingId variable is received via HTTP GET. This means the URL would be http://url.tld/trackingscriptfolder/script.php?tracking_id=123456 (or without the script.php in case of the .htaccess), where 123456 is the TrackingID. The rest is more or less just for debugging. The scripts returns a HTTP Code 422 and ends if there is no input given.

$trackingId = $_GET["tracking_id"];
if (empty($trackingId)) {
  $unprocessableEntity = 422;
  http_response_code($unprocessableEntity);
  echo "wrong input";
  return;
}

Next the URLs will be defined. The keys have to match the shipping providers so make sure the shipping providers are added at the library as well. The TrackingID will be added at the end of the URL, so make sure they have the right format.

$shippingProviderURLs = [
  "dhl" => 'https://nolp.dhl.de/nextt-online-public/set_identcodes.do?idc=',
...
];

Then follows the documented way of checking for the providers. It could technically be that at the same time a TrackingID is valid for more than one provider. To keep things simple, we’ll just use the first one (array_search instead of array_keys). In case there is none found, array_search returns false and the script continues. In case there is one found, the header() function is called to redirect the user to the correct provider page.

$checkedProvider = array_search(true, $result);
$urlOfCheckedProvider = $shippingProviderURLs[$checkedProvider];

if ($checkedProvider !== false) {
  header('location: ' . $urlOfCheckedProvider . $trackingId);
}

Now it’s up to you what you will do with the ones you can’t redirect. I decided to write a little skeleton.html file and include that with a simple message that the user could try the shipping providers where a check is not possible (no API, no website scraping, no regex). They are listed earlier:

$shippingProviderURLsNoCheck = [
  "DPD" => 'https://tracking.dpd.de/parcelstatus?query=',
...