TNEW unable to process Windcave hosted payments without first name

as someone implementing TNEW right now.. this is terrifying. How do you work around this? 

There is no viable work-around.  You either make your organizational customers do their online transactions through some sort of affiliated individual account - or they can't do transactions online.

very cool and awesome 

If they enter "The" as a first name and then the organization name as last name, would it work? I've had to do that with forms.

Good question – the answer to that is actually yes.   If there is anything, even just a period or dash, in the first name field the customer can then compete the transaction.  As I’m sure you’ve experienced – it is then impossible to remove that data from the first name field of the customer account, even in the application.  This causes all kind of problems with correspondence and letters and salutations.    In my limited testing, Windcave doesn’t actually care at all about the first name (it doesn’t even have separate first and last name fields on the hosted payment form), but TNEW won’t pass the order off to the Windcave hosted page without the existence of the first name.  Again, that’s just my limited testing so there maybe something else happening there.  The TNEW site log reports “An exception occurred while processing hosted payment: FirstName must be valid” and TNEW never passes off to Windcave. 

After nearly two years of support ticket I brought this to the forum semi-hoping that someone else would say they are having this problem also *OR* definitively indicate they are NOT having this problem.  It seems unlikely that we are the only organization using TNEW and Windcave hosted payments, so just looking for some community feedback.

I'm sure there are at least half a dozen ready answers as to why it's essential to allow the organization to pay for the order, BUT we are just fine falling into the Owner: Initiator logic. As I say it in layman's terms, it's the human that is doing the ordering (not a building or a corporation) so it also makes SENSE for the web order to come in from an affiliated individual.

However, I acknowledge that we also have a TNEW customization that edits the order to make the connection between the Owner and the Initiator, so we did already change the playing field. But if you boil it down to the question of what workaround to  adopt.... I think there's something important about talking through it "in English" and figuring out how that influences choices. 

Jamie

I'm just bumping this one again to see if anyone can at least confirm they have the same challenge with TNEW/Wincave (Payment Express) and organization accounts.  I am having a hard time digesting the notion that any sort of organizational account can no longer do any business through TNEW.

Jamie O'Brien said:

I acknowledge that we also have a TNEW customization that edits the order to make the connection between the Owner and the Initiator, so we did already change the playing field.

Hey Jamie - I'd love to know more about this customization - what data you collect and how it works.   
best wishes

Alison

Trying to wrap my brain around this one also.  It seems like in this situation (where the individual has to place the order in TNEW) you would have the individual as the owner of the order and the web-user as the initiator.

Alison Atkinson We can set up a time to chat--we know how to find each other. For anyone scanning forums at another time, I can add that my hope is that we replace our customization with the 'standard customization for Education' that the Network offers. I've not gotten details on it yet, but an initial chat with Consulting verified this concept is part of that offering.

Bill Waugh There might be a typo in your note? If not, rephrase and I'll see if I can't clarify better. For us, the Initiator is the individual and the web user (same entity), the Owner is the Organization. On the website itself, the web user is the Owner Initiator (and Recipient too), but then a procedure runs every few minutes to edit the order so that the Organization becomes the Owner. There's also a touch of customization to the TNEW receipt so that the org name can appear there, even though technically they won't have true attachment to the order until a few minutes later. We let the receipt act as an invoice that can serve POs, so it was essential to get the right names in the right places.

Hi Bill and all, 

Thank you for raising this issue. We have revisited this on the TNEW team and have confirmed that the customer name is not required when setting up a transaction with Windcave. Our current plan is to fix this issue in the upcoming version 7.48 release so that constituent accounts that do not have a first name value can successfully check out. We don't have a target release date yet, but it should be in the coming month. 

Best news of the week!!!  Thank you!