Shopping Cart Issues...

Yrogerg

I'm attempting to build a shopping cart and I've read 4-5 'tutorials' as well as browsed a few threads on here and I still can't quite grasp it.

Reference URL: http://207.178.129.225/fuel_system.php

I've got 19 other pages like this one, each has it's own table in MySQL. So, when the user clicks 'add to cart' I need to store 2 variables (which are passed in the url): catID & id (table name, item id).

I know I need to use $_Session vars to keep track of everything. But i'm confused as to how to add, remove, and view items from the 'cart'.

Here's what I've got atop the above page:

session_start();
$sid = session_id();
if(!$_SESSION['cart'])
	$_SESSION['cart'] = array();

This just basically keeps a session alive or starts one and checks to see if a cart exists. If you click on 'add to cart' you'll the query string I pass to addToCart.php (SID, catID, id).

How do I add/remove items? Bear in mind, I need to store 2 vars.
On the view cart page, I'm going to be querying MySQL for almost every item in their cart b/c each one might be in a different MySQL table, so is there an easy way to group items together by table name??

Thanks in advance!

ednark

ok basic concept:

you want to remember what the user is asking for.

then when they actually finish the purchase it needs to plop into the sql table for good.

use $_SESSION['cart'] or whatever to keep track of what the user is doing,

then when they user is ready to commit and finalize the order,
then translate your $_SESSION into sql code to store the thought for good

so you need a few things.

one sql representation of an order
one session representation of an order
some code that will create a sql statement out of you session
some code that will manipulate the specifics of your order - add item, remove item, etc

i recommend doing all your manipulation in php to your session version. then, when you are done, write the info into the database.

this way you don't need to have a SQL version of addItemToCart()

to do these things in a session is easy, as a _SESSION acts just like any other array. its just easier to keep the complicated logic out of SQL

add:
$_SESSION['cart']['items'][] = 'my item';

remove:
unset($_SESSION['cart']['items'][3]);

update
$_SESSION['cart']['items'][$id] = 'my udpated item';