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Published 05/15/2002

Appendix A

The CyberSource Message Manager

This appendix describes the Message Manager, which allows customization of reply flags and error messages.

Using Message Manager

The Message Manager uses the purchase errors dictionary, provided within Microsoft Site Server, to:

• Customize CyberSource error messages
• Provide internationalization/localization support for error messages

You can use the Message Manager to translate all of the CyberSource errors that are stored in the purchase errors dictionary for a transaction. Contents of this purchase errors dictionary are often displayed to customers as the reason for their transactions failing.

CyberSource populates this purchase errors dictionary on every failed transaction. These messages are often very useful for the merchants' own debugging purposes; however, these messages should never be displayed to the customer. In order to translate, customize, and even localize these error messages, use the message manager.

Using Message Manager

1. Open your site's global.asa file with your text editor of choice.

The global.asa file is located in your site's root directory.

For example: c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mystore\global.asa

2. Go to the function, "InitMessageManager."

In this function, there are several lines containing the words:

MSCSMessageManager.AddMessage

3. Add a line similar to this one to add a customized message:


Call MSCSMessageManager.AddMessage("DCARDREFUSED", "We were unable to validate your credit card. Please call our customer service department at 800 555-1234.")

Note  Error flag, DCOMPONENT, can be translated via the message manager to allow translation of CyberSource hard-coded error messages for component failures to display a customized error string.

How Message Manager Works

For every transaction sent to the ICS servers, an rflag is returned and checked against the Message Manager. If the Message Manager has a message defined for the returned rflag, then the user-defined message is logged to the purchase errors dictionary. If there is no message defined (specified in the message manager), then the default ics_rmsg is used.

Example  Using the CyberSource Message Manager

If an invalid credit card number is entered, the following is returned from CyberSource:

ics_rmsg = The following request field(s) is either invalid or missing: customer_cc_number

ics_rflag = DINVALIDCARD

If the message manager is not used, the customer is likely to see the error message, "The following request field(s) is either invalid or missing: customer_cc_number." Although this message is clear to the merchant, it may not the best customer communication. Unfamiliar codes are used, the customer doesn't know what a request field is, nor what to do about it. To clarify this message, the merchant should customize this message. To do this, the merchant will map the DINVALIDCARD rflag returned by the CyberSource servers to some other wording, such as "We are having trouble validating your credit information, please call our customer support department at 800-555-1212." With this mapping in place, when the component encounters an ics_rflag of DINVALIDCARD, the component will always use the merchant's defined message, rather than the default ics_rmsg.

Note  If you do not use the Message Manager, your store will use the default ics_rmsg.