shopping cart unique id

[Anon]

I'm building a shopping cart for a site that is selling a single item, a pillow, but with options for the buyer including size, fabric, etc.

I've set up a from that's sent to the add/viewcart page with the necessary variables. What I can't seem to get right, is to give each order-item a unique id so I can go back and build the viewcart table with it. I originally set a time stamp in a hidden variable on the form page, but that didn't work because IE caches the page sometimes no matter how I tell it not to (bug in IE), so the id was repeating.

I then thought I would let MySQL give the unique ID an an autoincremented field as the order is put in the db, but then how do I pull that exact order right back out to extract the id that I want to use as the cart/session variable?

Thanks for any ideas,
Leland Myrick

[Anon]

Use the uniqid PHP function to generate an id

There are then two ways to use it. Either store it as a cookie so it is present in each page/script or pass it from page to page via the URL or hideen form fields.

So in each script/page you should first check to see if the id exists, if so use it otherwise genrate a new one using the uniqid function (as this must be the first page/time the user has visited hence he has no previous id).

Hope this helps,

Fes

[lawnmowerman]

You can get the unique value of the inserted line using mysql_insert_id() after the INSERT:

$result = mysql_query( $sql );
$unique_id = mysql_insert_id();

-Rich