Kryptronic Software Support Forum

I think the problem stems from the fact that you have 'S12' listed as a sub-affiliate for 'S13'.  Remove that and I think this will work properly.  'S13' doesn't have any sub-affiliates and shouldn't have an entry there.  The logic is circular for traversing the affiliate membership tree - so associating 'S13' with 'S13' on the 'S13' entry would have closed the loop of the circular logic and only returned those two.

The problem still occurs.  I debugged the code, and I don't see where there is logic to handle more than 2 levels of affiliates, so I added it myself and now it seems to be working fine.   I put the affiliate commission calculation logic, for secondary affiliates, in a loop that iterates up to 10 times (as per my client's requirements) to pay commissions of 1% each for up to 10 levels.

Nick,

Referencing your above code, yes, I saw that.  I've been debugging thru this exact code, and related code, for days.  This does indeed create a associative array of all affiliates related to the primary affiliate,   Therein lies the problem: My client expects to have 1,000s or even 10,000s of affiliates.  So the (apparently) fallacy in this code is that the affiliates would ALL be entered into the related affiliate field manually. 

For example, let's say my first affiliate is A1.  S/he signs up a single subaffiliate A2, who signs up A3, etc. 

A1 is the parent of A2
A2 is the parent of A3
A3 is the parent of A4
A4 is the parent of A5
A5 is the parent of A6
A6 is the parent of A7
A7 is the parent of A8
etc
A14 is the parent of A15

Now, let's say that customer1 orders, and indicates that his/her order should be credited to A13.  The way this needs to work for my client, and I would think for _all_ multilevel affiliate companies, is that CCP will look up A13, and find that A12 is A13's sponsor.  It would then add A12 to the hash, and repeat the process, finding that A12 was sponsored by A11, etc.  If this loop is not implemented, then I don't see how the affiliate commissions can support more than one or two levels without manual process, which won't work.

With the existing code, the CCP site admin would have to manually enter this entire lineage for  single sub affiliate.  Or am I missing something...

What my client needs is the ability to have CCP automatically determine the parent affiliates for any given affiliate.  So, I fixed this by reversing the related affiliates field to only specify a singe parent affiliate (rather than the child), and then to loop thru the db records until it found all required parent affiliates. 

Can you confirm that my above research is accurate?  And that my approach is valid?

Thanks in advance.

Right.  I understand this. 

On your test machine, can you actually try to create 5 levels of affiliates, place an order that should be credited to the lowest level affiliate, and can you confirm that all 5 affiliates get credit?  On my production server, and on a clean install of CCP on an R&D server, this test fails to credit 5 levels; it only results in 2 levels getting credit for the sale.

webmaster,07/02/2004 12:26:52 PM wrote:

Yes, and it worked.  I did notice (forgot as I coded this a long time ago) that the column 'affacct_xaff' has to include all related affiliates as the code does not follow a chain through the table.  In this instance I created five affiliates, numbered 111 ... 555.

<snip>

This was all done by setting up the affiliate accounts using the front-end and clicking the sub-affiliate sign up links in each account.

I verified all five affiliates got paid the right amount for several orders.

Thank you Nick.  This is the info I was looking for.  From stepping thru the source code, the behavior you describe is consistent with what I was able to derrive from looking at the logic.

I've already modified CCP so that it automatically follows the chains of affiliates upwards, like a SLL (singly linked list), with out requiring that each affiliate be mentioned in the affacct_xaff field.

webmaster,07/02/2004 01:16:40 PM wrote:

Excellent.  Just be careful that the right thing happens if an affiliate account is deleted via admin.  With the way it's set up now (by default I mean), admin routines check a reference table and verify that any references to a deleted affacct_id remaining in that table in the affacct_xaff column are deleted as well.  I'm not sure how the program will react if they're left in there.

Thanks for the tip.  To address this referential integrity issue, I've set up CCP so that an affiliate account can only be made inactive, it can't be deleted.  Same for customers.

Do you have your site set up to credit affiliates as soon as the order is placed?

Check to make sure the Perform Order Updates field is set to Yes for the active payment method you're testing with.  By default (usually with payment methods that aren't realtime) things like inventory and affiliate payments aren't automatically done (because you don't have the cash yet).

What exactly is the default for this script, with regard to affiliate levels?

In order to have multiple levels, beyond 2, is there something that has to be done to make that happen?

(1) There is no default setting.

(2) Affiliates simply have to refer each other using each other's links for signup creating a chain of signups each with their referrer's id.