Shopping Basket on Every Page?!?

[Anon]

A shopping basket is going to be shown on every page of my site. I guess a
some database queries to get the product name, price, quantity on every page
is needless. Any ideas on the best way?

Is it a good idea to put a huge block of html in a session var (the html to
display the basket), and use that. Then once a product is added/removed from
the basket, requery the database and recreate the html...?

[Anon]

Probably a better idea to have all the shopping basket code (including the HTML that actually displays it) in a separate file, which you include() at the appropriate place on each page.

[Anon]

The problem I was thinking, was querying the database all the time for the price etc., but I've found another way. I'll put the product name, qty and price into session variables, and when they add to the basket etc., I can just add to these veriables, and then put them into the database at the last page (checkout). As well as saving on db queries, it saves having loads of basket records that might never be used.