longshot

phouse

Thanks to anyone who has responded to my previous posts, very useful.

This post is a bit of a long shot because it's not strictly PHP.

Hopefully this won't be construed as spamming because i asked a similar question
before which was:-

"I've developed a shopping cart with PHP and MySql which works fine. Once an item is added to the cart it is withdrawn from the database instead of leaving the withdrawing till the checkout stage. This avoids shoppers all choosing an item that may be the last in stock. The only problem is if the shopper that has the item in their cart decides not to buy and leaves the site without removing the item from the cart or the session times out, the item hasn't been purchased but also hasn't been put back in the database. What can i do to get round this?"

I had some very useful advice which leaned towards withdrawing the item at checkout for simplicity reasons. If i had the time i might venture into the other recommendation of writing a script to check the cart if the session timed out or the browser closed without a purchase and replenish the database with unpurchased items.

What i want to know is does asp.net offer any different sultions to this problem or would i be left with the same options?

mmonaco

First of all instead of removing the item from the database what you should do is set up a little status flag. 0 for normal, 1 for on hold in a cart and 3 for purchased, that way You'll have permanent records of everything.

I'm not exactly sure what you're selling but what you should really have is a 'product type' table with all the descriptions and references to pictures and all that. Then if you want a product table which links a product type to a purchase.

Either way in addiont to the status flag you should also have a date_modified column. What you can do then is write a a function in php that will search for products with a status of 2 and arange it by date_modified descending.

Now at the top of your list will be the item which has been on hold the longest, you can use this information accordingly.

In addition you can store a function in the database which will run periodicly (daily, hourly, weekly, however you want) which will update the status flag back to 0 if they've been sitting there too long.

THere's a hundred thousand answers to your question. Maybe someone has something better...