taxes in items sold

Hi,
I am using ecart from the supersuite for dreamweaver cs3. My client's business is out of NY. I have to set up the cart so that all ny residents are charged the ny state tax as well as their county taxes. Also all items sold and their shipping costs have to be taxed. I know that I will have to list all of the counties in ny and the tax. How do I set up the cart so that if a customer selects ny as their state they have to pick their county? And those outside of Ny state are not required to do this? How do I set up the cart so that taxes for ny residents are charged on the item and shipping? where as those outside of ny state are not?
Thank you,
K

For the first part of this where you have the list of counties to choose from you can make this list a required field by using some client side validation from the Validation Toolkit or the new CSS Form Builder.

This can be a little tricky since you only have two client validations that you can apply to the select list. You can use the required validation or the regular expression. I think you may need to use the regular expression type of validation since the list of states will have values for all of the states.

You would apply this as a validation for the state select list, then you apply the conditional validation response. Using the state select list validation as the trigger you would conditionally validate the counties select list. After applying this response you can apply all of the regular validations to the form including the required validation for the counties. To find out more info about applying the client validations you should take a look at the help for Validation Toolkit or CSS Form Builder, in here it lists the types of validations and responses that can be used and how they work.

As far as how you are charging the user and how much you should be able to configure this in the calculation portion of the charge rule, you can do it based on the subtotal of the total price column to get the value of just the contents of the cart.

Thank you Eric. That was helpful the validation was clear. Regarding Ny residents, how do I go about using the ecart to charge, only NY residents, tax on the shipping as well as the total for the items. So they are taxed on shipping and purchases. Whereas residents of other states will only be charged tax on purchases.
Thank you

For this part you would make sure that you have the box checked in your shipping tab of your eCart object for the 'include shipping in cart subtotal when calculating sales tax'. This would ensure that the shipping is included as part of the subtotal, then tax will be applied to this.

How you ensure that non NY residents are not charged tax on the shipping is in the charge rule for the tax, instead of making the calculation based on the subtotal of the cart you do it for the subtotal of the total price column, this way the shipping will not be included.