Shopping Cart Orders Table

psychobilly

I am building a shopping cart from scratch. The programming is no problem for me but the logistics have me stumped on one item. I'm hoping someone here can help;

When the user clicks "add to cart" on an item, should I store this item in a session variable? If so, do I build a string of comma separated sku numbers, and explode the string and run through a loop to get each items info when displaying the cart?

Then when they are ready to check out, I need to store this info in a database so we can extract it later to fill the order. What's the best way to do this? Say they have seven items in their order and some of them have quantities of more than one... what is the best way to store this so it can be retrieved by the order filling page that we pull up and print & pack?

sneakyimp

You should check out the [man]serialize[/man] function. Where you store it is up to you. There are several options:
1) store serialized shopping cart in a cookie - cookies have length limitations though
2) store serialized shopping cart in session - in this case session vars end up living in a file in the /tmp folder. It's a pretty good way to do it but when the session ends (browser closes or session times out) then shopping cart is gone
3) store serialized shopping cart in a field of type TEXT in a database...can be correlated to an account id for permanence.

peytonrm

I think I would store the cart data in a table of the database and associate it with a foreign key to your account table. That would give you persistence as well as flexibility to let them, say, log on at a different machine to complete their order.

benracer

I have stored the items id and qty in a session variable which contains an array. The key being the id and value being qty. Then when a finished button is clicked the array is serialized then insered into a new row. The only problem i find with this is you will need to store the current price incase the items price changes as you have the order.