Create Unique Order Number

[billhobbs]

How would you create a unique order number using PHP?

[laserlight]

What is a 'unique order number'?

You need to provide a context by which you ask a question. Things like an overview of what are you trying to do, whether you use a database, etc.

[billhobbs]

Okay, I'm building a ecommerce site that will need to generate a unique order number so that it can be used when a user logs in to a different website. The other site will utilize mySQL as the database. So I need to be able to put the order number in the database.

[MarkR]

Normally I'd use an autogenerated primary key on your orders table. This is certainly what we do on our shops.

Anyone who makes a shop where order and basket are different things, hasn't thought enough about the problem.

Mark

[dcav]

Yeah, your unique ids would be an auto-index. The following is the pseudo schema I usually use, but much more complicated than that. The links have relations. Whatever suits your needs...

tblUser {user_id, user_name, user_blabla}

tblProduct {product_id, product_name, product_price, product_blabla}

tblOrder {order_id, user_id, product_id_delimited, product_count_delimited, order_datetime, order_blabla}

Create your tables like the above and use your user id as a session cookie or whatever you want, then you can perform more queries to get the rest of the info so that you can insert an order record.