Thank you redirection - screen scrape instead of iframe

[fizzy]

I've read the help on redirecting to a thank you page on my site: http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.redirection.htm



I need the download links in the thank you page, so I'm using the iframe option.



But I need to customise the layout a bit to match in with my site (white text on black etc).



I know I'm supposed to be able to add CSS to the page which might accommodate me, but I'm just wondering whether just screen scraping the thank you page will also work?



This would give me full control over the styling and also avoid iframe usability issues.



But being new to e-junkie, I just want to check that scraping https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/rp.php?noredirect=true&txnid=XXXXX should work just like an iframe and would not cause any e-junkie functionality to break.



Many thanks,

Janine.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Hm, you're welcome to try scraping, and we used to recommend that before we came up with the iframe method, but I'm not sure scraping would be a reliable method anymore, as described here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/2726



If you'd like to revisit the recommended iframe approach, this page explains how you can add custom HTML, CSS or JavaScript to your E-junkie thank-you pages:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.custom.thankyou-page.htm

[fizzy]

Hi Tyson,



Thanks for the reply.



I read the other thread, but do not know what the change really means. "We have changed the code on the thank you page so that the download links can't be prefetched by AVG's linkscanner and similar programs". I know that the download links submit a form on the page at the moment, but they seem to work fine for me. Would they not work if I was using AVG etc? While I'm scraping the thank you page code, I don't do anything with it, I just spit it out as is. So, I was hoping that most code changes you could make to it would not affect things, avoiding the weakness with screen scraping. The only things I could see that would mess things up were if the thank you page contained relative (local) links or if you turned the thank you page into a complete html page.



With the iframe, I was having trouble getting the colouring of the page to show up consistently in all browsers. I was adding a <style type="text/css"> block to the box where i can put html etc, but since that does not end up in the head of the iframe, i thought that might have been causing issues. Also, there does not seem to be a consistent parent element that I can style, so without knowing all permutations of the thank you page, I was finding it tricky. The iframe content seems to be just a fragment of a HTML page instead of a complete HTML doc in its own right, so I think that's causing a problem.

I would need to style the iframe so that it was all light text on a black background. When this wasn't working properly, the text would often look invisible (black on black) which would be a disaster if it happened to a customer.

Have you any samples for sites needing a dark background thank you page?



Thanks for your time,

Janine.

[E-junkie_Guru]

I'm not involved in Development here, so I'm personally not familiar with exactly what we did in the thank-you/download page.



All I can say is that there was a problem where some antivirus and similar types of security scanner software (notably AVG in particular) were prefetching our download links to check for potential computer threats, and that activity was expiring those links before the buyer ever saw their link in the first place, so Development made a change in the way we issue and present download links to fix that problem.



This also happened to make it trickier to parse screen-scrapes, particularly where multiple-item purchases are concerned (e.g., the name='ej_frm_0' etc. are always numbered sequentially in the output for each product but may not bear a consistent correspondence to any particular product). I think if you only scrape the entire source of https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/rp.php?noredirect=true&txnid=XXXXX without trying to parse it and then simply dump that source directly into the page you output for each buyer, then it should work fine and your own site/page CSS should "just work".

[fizzy]

Thanks for the explanation Tyson.



I understand how link scanners could have caused a problem with download links alright.



But as you say, I'm just dumping the whole page out (I get the same content that would be in the iframe, it's just not in an iframe). So, hopefully this is OK. There have been a few successful sales already but I'll keep a close eye on things for a while.



Many thanks for your time,

Janine.