Cart Order Management Question

[godwheel]

Hello,

I've built a decent shopping cart for a client, but I have a general question regarding order management. What is the BEST way to store the order information?

This is the problem.

The cart has a field for colors, each shirt lets say, is available in different colors. For this reason, I have a color table with colorID and colorName. Then a linker table that links the products to the colors and so forth.

However, when orders are placed, I store the details of the order as colorID and productID... what happens if that product or color is later deleted from the database... I lose the reference in the order details (say, if someone wants to check their order history).

Example:
ORDER ID: 1001
Product: rock'n'roll t-shirt in blue
$9.99

The t-shirt is no longer available in blue or for sale...

So, do I have to add these order details as STATIC pieces of information in the orders table? IF so, what is the best way?

Any theories would be appreciated.

[cretaceous]

on a similar project, yes, I always store the full data in the orders table to cover just such eventualities - otherwise what do you do if the price of an item changes?
(if you are passing it to a third party payment merchant you prob need to pass full data anyway)

another trick is to disallow 'delete' - the button can still be labelled 'delete' but all it does is set an "I'm deleted" flag rather than killing it forever - so later queries will find the item