help on shopping cart!

[Anon]

i'm trying to develop a simple shopping cart apps. though i've done it using a database to monitor the contents of my shopping cart. i think it be would be cool to develop this using cookies. i can't seem to imagine how to go about it. though i've tried using cookies in identifying those returnee users. and thats all i can think of how to use the cookies. so, the thought of adding and removing items in a cookies seems a daunting task i can't handle. moreover how can i monitor the contents of my cart when my apps move between pages.

thanks and God bless.

[Anon]

The accepted (most flexible / least troublesome) way to develop shopping carts is using sessions to store the browsers cart data.

This means that you use a cookie / passed GET variable to identify a user and retrieve their data from a database.

PHP4 - see session management functions
PHP3 - try PHPLIB / write your own.

Good luck

Matt B

[Anon]

Hi: I have done this before. And because your target is just test and simple. I give my advice that you can do it by session which provided in php 4.00; Here is the deference between cookied and session:
cookies is saved at client side , session is saved in your server.
cookies may be forbidden by user, but session is only divided by your server.
cookies need user action to delete.session will lost when session is end.
At all ,cookies is not safe.On the other hand session is lower safe than database.After all,it is a good idea.