Numbered Tickets

Jody Johnson

Hello, 


I need to create a site to sell tickets to an event and I need to have a ticket number with each ticket purchased. The venue we are using requires people to show a ticket, with a ticket number. I can't seem to find a way to include a number, any suggestions?


 

Brian Mucha

I've struggled with this in the past with surveys. I never found a way to assign and store a sequential number. I think the best you can do is either generate a random number or a time stamp.


However, since you are selling the tickets - presumably in luminate - you have the confirmation number already built into the system. Will that do for your needs? It's guaranteed to be unique, is stored in the system with the transaction, and can be communicated to the user. It's just inconveniently long.

Jody Johnson

Brian Mucha:

I've struggled with this in the past with surveys. I never found a way to assign and store a sequential number. I think the best you can do is either generate a random number or a time stamp.


However, since you are selling the tickets - presumably in luminate - you have the confirmation number already built into the system. Will that do for your needs? It's guaranteed to be unique, is stored in the system with the transaction, and can be communicated to the user. It's just inconveniently long.

Thanks for the suggestions.


We already thought of the transaction number, but unfortunately some people buy multiple tickets and we need each one with their own identifiers. Darn exceptions to the rules. 

Sara Hoffman

Could you include a hidden text question and populate it with an S9 timestamp?

Brian Mucha

The timestamp idea won't solve the per-item requirement, at least not without a bit of scripting. You'd have to store one number per ticket purchased.


Are you selling them via a donation form? Or with ecom?

Jody Johnson

We were looking to sell them with ecomm, but are open to using other tools in Luminate if they will work better. 

Brian Mucha

That might actually help.


Each ecom product has a bunch of tribute fields, which you can turn on or off. You can even change the field labels. It's a common trick to use these for other purposes.


So what if you use one of those fields along with Sara's timestamp trick or an S55 random number?


You'd have to hide the quantity button on the item so that each ticket would have to be opened and added to the cart one by one in order to generate individual unique numbers.


The add to cart buttons on the views would be a problem too. I think the user would have to actually open the item for the formula to run and populate the tribute field. Adding a product option would turn those to Configure buttons, which open the item.



I suppose you could probably allow quantity and create a javascript that populates the tribute field with the proper number of random numbers delimited with commas or pipes, etc.



In any case, this approach is all client side and would be easy for anyone slightly smart to hack and stick whatever value they want in your tribute field. So long as the site is closed before the drawing, I don't think this is a problem really. Duplicate numbers seem like more of an issue. Nothing but chance is ensuring the numbers are unique. That might be an argument for S55 rather than S9.

Patrick Hynes

As an addition/extension to Brian's suggestion:


You coud use the E130 tag to prepend the ecommerce tracking number to your random/timestamp generated number.  So, the ticket number ends up being the ecommerce tracking number + the generated number.  That way, you'd be pretty much guaranteed of uniqueness.  You would have to prepend some token to the script generated value that could later be replaced on the confirmation page/auto-responder.  e.g. set the hidden tribute field value to "__tracking_code__123456" (with 123456 being your generated number).  Then, do this on the confirmation/auto-responder:

[[E130:[[T8:[[S120:dc:donationInfo]]]] "__tracking_code__" [[S120:dc:trackingCode]] replaceall]]


I have not thought this out too much nor tested it, but it may get you closer to what you need.