How would you approach this?

[sgtpepper]

I am wondering how you would try to approach the following. Basically, a 'wishlist' type of application. I am displaying real estate. I would like to give the user an opertunity to click on a button that will 'store' the property in a cart/wishlist.

When they are done looking at all proerties, than email the wishlist to the real estate office.

I am a php novice but learning fast.

I first thought about a simple shopping cart approach, but I am afraid I couldnt find anything simple enough.

Can anyone offer some advice on how to implement this? Maybe with some sample code?

[Pig]

You would have to make them register first (plenty of tuts on that).

Then you simply place a link that passes the id of the property to a process page that takes their id, and the houses id, and puts them in a table that has those 2 columns. Then you just run a query to get all the house id's that have their user id. YOu can do a quick join to get the rest of the house details.

You should also have an edit page so they can delete old entries.

You could have the process page open in a seperate browser window, and use javascript to close it automatically too.

there's my 2 cents.

[dalecosp]

I would suggest Sessions; you aren't necessarily asking for a database, I think.

Create a form and get their contact information. Store this in Session variables. Each page of the site would contain a form that would add a home to the session variable "wishlist"...

reg_handler.php (this code goes on the page that handles website user registration. In this example, you are adding the username entered by the web user to the session variable entitled 'name'...

$_SESSION['name']=POST['name'];  // so on for each field
                                // would be good to do some verification...

To do the verification, use something like this:

function ValidateInput($var, $type) {

    trim($var);
    if ($type=="name") { $Pattern = "^[A-Z][c]?[A-Z]?[a-z]+[a-z]$"; }
    elseif ($type=="email") { $Pattern = "^([0-9a-z]+)([0-9a-z\._-]+)@([0-9a-z\._-]+)\.([0-9a-z]+)"; }
    elseif ($type=="phone") { $Pattern = "^([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{4})"; }
    elseif ($type=="address") { $Pattern = "^[0-9A-Za-z]"; }
    $valid=ereg($Pattern, $var);
    return $valid;

} # end of Function

and then call it thusly:

$namevalid=ValidateInput($_SESSION['name']);
if (!$namevalid) { echo "please re-enter a valid name."; }

Once the user is registered initialize the array "wishlist".

$_SESSION['wishlist']=array();

Then, on each page, you should have a form:

<form action="$PHP_SELF" method="POST">
Add this home to your wishlist:<input type=checkbox name="add2list"><br>
<input type=hidden name="<?="$property_number" ?>">
<input type=submit name=submit value="Add to Wishlist">

Each page should also contain the following code:

if ($_POST['add2list']) {
   $x=count($_SESSION['wishlist']);
   $_SESSION['wishlist'][$x]=$_POST['property_number'];

Now, when the user is "finished" at your site, you have a nice array of property numbers named $_SESSION['wishlist'] ...

Or, something like that ....
🙂

[sgtpepper]

Dale,

Thanks for the above post....sorry....I am having difficulty understanding how to implement it. Can you go into a little more detail?

[BuzzLY]

Dale's suggestion is good, and fairly straightforward. I suggest you read the manual on sessions, or perhaps get a book that goes into detail on how sessions work.

If you want something a little more permanent, so that a user could access that wishlist from any computer, for example, I would create a wishlist table. All you have to do is store the user's id and the property id in that table. The user could then bring up his wishlist page any time he wanted, add to it, remove items, etc... even email it to anyone he wanted (including a real estate agent.) He could even give that real estate agent the url to his wishlist page, and the agent could see all the pertinent information online without having to worry about whether or not they have an HTML capable browser.

[sgtpepper]

Placing it in a table seems more like what I would like to do. I imagine this could be fairly easy to accomplish? Basically, would I be inserting the selections into the table?

Can anyone point me to a tutorial that could help me accomplish this?

[sgtpepper]

I have searched the net and this forum. I cant seem to find a good tutorial or code snippets that can help me accomplish a simple 'wishlist'.

Basically, I need to know how to add a customer ID and their slections to a table that will store them in a shopping_cart (actually wish list).

I am really stuck. Can anyone point me in the right direction. I am very new to this but can learn better with tutorials or a few examples of code.

I really appreciate dalecosp post, but I dont understand it entirely.

[dalecosp]

Well, I went and edited my post and included some additional code and commentary.

Let me know how many parse errors you get 🙂 It should work, though, the theory is correct...

[sgtpepper]

Here is what I have so far.....

form.php

<?
session_start();
?>

<form action="reg_handler.php" method="POST">
  <p>name<input type="text" name="name" size="20"></p>
  <p><input type="submit" value="Submit" name="B1"></p>
</form>

and reg_handler.php

<?
session_start();
?>

<?
$_SESSION['name']=POST['name'];
function ValidateInput($var, $type) {

    trim($var);
    if ($type=="name") { $Pattern = "^[A-Z][c]?[A-Z]?[a-z]+[a-z]$"; }
    elseif ($type=="email") { $Pattern = "^([0-9a-z]+)([0-9a-z._-]+)@([0-9a-z._-]+).([0-9a-z]+)"; }
    elseif ($type=="phone") { $Pattern = "^([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{4})"; }
    elseif ($type=="address") { $Pattern = "^[0-9A-Za-z]"; }
    $valid=ereg($Pattern, $var);
    return $valid;

} # end of Function
$namevalid=ValidateInput($_SESSION['name']);
if (!$namevalid) { echo "please re-enter a valid name."; }
?>

I am getting an error

Parse error: parse error in reg_handler.php on line 7

Does this mean that my reg_handler.php script is not getting the name variable?

[dalecosp]

No, it means there's a syntax error. Try

$_SESSION['name']=$_POST['name'];

//note $_ before 'POST' 

😉

[sgtpepper]

hmmm.....

now I get

Warning: Missing argument 2 for validateinput()

[dalecosp]

Yeah, look at the function, it calls for the variable and a string to tell it the type of variable you're validating...

$namevalid=ValidateInput($_POST['name'], "name");

[sgtpepper]

Thank you....it seems to work...although I cant see the items in the wishlist.

I tried to
<? echo $_SESSION['wishlist']; ?>

But that just output 'Array'.

How can I now show what is in the wishlist

[dalecosp]

Well, do a var_dump($_SESSION['wishlist']); if you just wanna see what's there...

To do something useful (like echo to screen...?) call a specific item, such as "echo $SESSION['wishlist'][0];" or, for the entire list:

for ($x=0; $x<count($_SESSION['wishlist']); $x++) {
   echo $_SESSION['wishlist'][$x]."<br>";
   }

Should work, depending on how the array looks...

🙂

[sgtpepper]

Thank you!

It is working great. One last thing and I will try to leave you alone.... 🙂

What about being able to remove an item from the wishlist....how could I add another button or checkbox to remove the item in the list.

Thanks for all this help

[dalecosp]

Gets a bit more complex, and, once again, I'm headed out on a call...

You could probably print out a list with checkboxes. As for deleting....maybe I'll be back in a while. Or, just keep searching...

[sgtpepper]

So, I have gone a little further with my code

<form action="<?$PHP_SELF?>" method="POST">
Add this home to your wishlist:<input type=checkbox name="add2list"><br>
Remove this home fromyour wishlist:<input type=checkbox name="removelist"><br>
<input type=hidden value="<? echo $row['Id']; ?>" name="propnumber">
<input type=submit name=submit value="Add to Wishlist">
</form>
<?
if ($_POST['add2list']) {
   $x=count($_SESSION['wishlist']);
    $_SESSION['wishlist'][$x]=$_POST['propnumber'];
}
if ($_POST['removelist']) {
   $x=count($_SESSION['wishlist']);
    $_SESSION['wishlist'] = null;
}
?>
<?
for ($x=0; $x<count($_SESSION['wishlist']); $x++) {
   echo $_SESSION['wishlist'][$x]."<br>";
   }
?>

So, this will allow me to add a specific property but the checkbox I am using will delete the WHOLE list.

It would be great if I could somehow move the remove checkbox next to the property and have it delete just that property....that would be great.

[sgtpepper]

I am also noticing that when I look at a new property (uses same php file) my wishlist selections are gone.

I attempted to fix this my using registering the whishlist session....

Now my wishlist does not dissapear, but my selections change to the current property.