Recurring Order: Configurable Repeating Line Items

For me, it was a lot easier to use CIM (instead of ARB) and just associate a recurring fee as a feature with the relevant product or subscription. I'm not sure if this is your use case, but for subscriptions, this worked great for us.

CIm ? ARB? a small link would be very much appreciated - thank you.

CIM cannot be used in combination with the ARB Service. These are two totally separate services.

Customer Information Manager (CIM) is a new paid service that allows merchants to store their customers’ sensitive payment information on our secure servers for use in future transactions. CIM helps eliminate steps in the checkout process for a merchant’s repeat customers, potentially increasing loyalty and revenue. It can also help merchants comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, since customer information is no longer stored on their local servers.

Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) is a powerful tool that enables you to provide a scheduled recurring billing service to your customers. ARB is completely automated—there’s no manual entry of transactions required at each billing. The process is simple. You will create an ARB “subscription” (using a subscription form similar to the Virtual Terminal) that includes the customer’s payment information, billing amount, and a specific billing interval and duration. The payment gateway does the rest, generating the subsequent recurring transactions based on the set schedule. Subscriptions may also be created from eligible previous transactions and via batch upload.

from http://bparanj.blogspot.com/2008/04/authorizenet-cim-and-arb.html

I personally recommend CIM because it gives you a lot more flexibility.

The problem I see is this patch does not address the real issue here.

In looking at the code we have the following which is not correct:

  // recreate order
  if (!empty($fee->data['uc_recurring_order'])) {
    $order->products = $fee->data['uc_recurring_order']['products'];
    $result = db_query("SELECT * FROM {uc_order_line_items} WHERE order_id = %d", $fee->order_id);
    while ($line_item = db_fetch_array($result)) {
      uc_order_line_item_add($order->order_id, $line_item['type'], $line_item['title'], $line_item['amount'], $line_item['weight'], $line_item['data']);
    }
  }

We should create the order and then get ubercart to add line items, so a line items get added for shipping if the order contains shippable products or adds tax if tax is required on the order.

Not sure I follow? This modules purpose is to duplicate an order with the same products on some regular interval. So shouldn't things like shipping and taxes be calculated at the time of the order (which is different to the time the user checked out). What if someone moves address, the shipping and/or taxes could be different on the recurring orders.

I know that this module currently just duplicate everything (which is the easy option), but I don't think that is the most flexible approach and we shouldn't treat these orders any different to other orders in ubercart. We should allow ubercart to get a chance to update these orders in the same way it does with orders that go through the checkout system. That just means that any modules that add line items - shipping/taxes/discounts can all operate on recurring orders in the same way they can operate on normal orders.

I would like to add line items. Will this patch work for that? My use case is a delivery service in which some clients request additional products with their service after they've subscribed. Right now, I'm not sure how to alter the new recurring fee, except by changing the fee itself using Authorize.net CIM.

Just an answer to myself: I figured out I can add products in hook_uc_recurring_renewal_pending()