Close & Get Info off Session

[Anon]

Ok I have a shopping cart right that uses sessions and inside those session when a user adds an item to his cart, it will debit the quantity of that item with a -1, and once he empty's his cart it will regive the item its inventory back, my problem is how do I make this work if someone closes the BROWSER window, in the PHP.INI i have the sessions limited to 15 minutes. Does this make sense?

I hope it is important I figure this out. Read the articles on PHP.ORG for SESSIONS and I am still confused.

Thanks!

[Anon]

um, a bit of javascript could help this. when a user closes their browser you can force another window to open that only has the purpose of calling a script to destroy the session and regive the item its inventory. this has inevitable problems as not everyone has javascript or javascript enabled. there is also the problem of users closing the new window before it has a chance to call the script. and there is the problem of a lost connection (dail-up).

i would suggest that you have a cart that does nothing to the inventory until check out. this way you do not have a problem with 'missing inventory'. once the user goes through check out and actually pays for the goods, then deduct the inventory.

this may seem like a problem if you have one item of something left and two users have it in their cart. but this just lets the first to check out get the item. you can then give the other user an error when they try and check out with that item. or, you can check at every new page if the items in a user's cart are still available and give them a quick message that an item in their cart is no longer currently in stock.

just some ideas.

[fitzbean]

Hey Chris, how about in the case that I wanted to display the # of users, or thier names while they are 'logged in' .. suppose I have a simple mysql table to adjust thier user record to mark that they just logged in; how besides having a logout link (not many people use it), could I have the status of a logged in updated if they just close the browser? Or is there a much better way of doing this? I suppose JS could be used again.

[Anon]

you can use javascript but you can also keep track of your users in a database that will tell you when the are logged in and logged out. in the table you should keep a timestamp for each user that is updated each time the user moves from page to page. if the user sits longer than x minutes, automatically log the user out.

[Anon]

That was a really good idea, your right, I can save the session in the database, very nice, worked great. Thank you!