Shopping cart assistance

Abaddon879

Hi,

I am currently trying to create a online sandwich order website for my university project, but am having trouble finding a shopping cart that can handle my needs without replacing my existing database structure.

The sandwich orders are made up of a type of bread, a style of sandwich, and one or more fillings.

Each of these items are stored in their own tables, for example I have tables for Bread, Style and Filling which store all the different options available.

Once the order has been completed, the main order details will be held in an Order table, with the multiple fillings held in a SandwichFilling table and linked to the Order.

I need a shopping cart, or a suggestion of how to implement my own, that is able to handle this data storage format.

I know this is a big ask, and I may need to develop my own custom cart, however I was wondering if anyone knows of a simple cart solution that can be customized and used within an existing setup?

Thanks,
David

Bjom

If you want to roll your own: this is a popular topic and you can find a plethora of turorials.

here's what google found me:

look here

I find it usually best to start off with well written tutorial. If you get stuck, we're here to help.

Abaddon879

I have searched google, but the sheer variety of tutorials available is a little daunting, plus they all seem to use different methods. Some use sessions, while some store the cart in either a new or existing database table.
Also, from what I can tell they often seem to store just a single product id. What I need the cart to store however are multiple product ids for each item.

For example each order item will be made up of:

bread_id
style_id
and then up to 6
filling_id

I was thinking of storing them as an array in a session variable so it stored them like so:

bread_id, style_id, filling_id1, filling_id2, filling_id3, filling_id4, filling_id5, filling_id6
 '0001',   '002',     '004',     '003',       '011',       '012',        '',          ''
 '0002',   '007',     '012',     '024',       '001',       '009',        '006',          '032'
 '0002',   '003',     '004',     '002',          '',          '',           '',             ''

Do I have a correct understanding of sessions and would this work? I was then hoping to be able to extract them to retrieve the individual components of each sandwich ordered so I could display them on the shopping cart page and eventually use them to complete the order?

Abaddon879

I have finally found a solution that I think will work, using sessions.

Im storing the sandwich order in a session called 'cart' using this code:

$_SESSION['cart'][] = array(
"bread" => $bread,
"style" => $style,
"fillings" => $filling,
"qty" => $qty
);

This gives mes the following output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [bread] => 002
            [style] => 001
            [fillings] => Array
                (
                    [0] => 003
                    [1] => 002
                    [2] => 014
                )

        [qty] => 1
    )

)

My problem now is how to retrieve the data from this session successfully? I have tried using a foreach loop, but as I have it (see below), it just seems to give me the following error:
Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in E:\students\06125646\LaMunchonette\order\test.php on line 22

foreach($_SESSION['cart'][] as $cartItems) {
  list($bread,$style,$fillings,$qty) = $cartItems;
  echo $qty.'x '.$bread.' '.$style.'<br />With: ';
  foreach($fillings as $f) {
	  echo $f.'<br />';
  }
}

I tried reducing this, but I then got:
Undefined offset: 0

foreach($_SESSION['cart'] as $cartItems) {

Any help? My project is due in Monday 4pm and I'm running out of ideas at this short notice.

Thanks,
David

Bjom

the error means that you did not supply an array. before passing anything to the foreach, check if it is an array or not and then either do the foreach or simply display it straightaway like so:

if (is_array($var)) {
    foreach ($var as $key=$value) {
       echo $key, "=>", $value; 
   }
} else {
 echo $var;
}

be aware that sessions have a certain lifetimeafter which they get garbage collected. If that is ok, then go ahead 🙂

Abaddon879

Please forgive my ignorance, as I have only been learning PHP for about 2 weeks (Our University lecturer was rubbish and I ended up self-learning, along with trying to teach the rest of the class).

I now have it outputting the details of the array, including the nested array for fillings.

$i=0;
$var=$_SESSION['cart'];

if (is_array($var)) {
	foreach ($var[$i] as $key=>$value) {
		if ($key == "fillings"){
			if (is_array($value)){
				foreach ($value as $key=>$value) {
					echo $key, "=>", $value, "<br />";
				}
			}
		} else{
			echo $key, "=>", $value, "<br />";
		}	   		
   }
} else {
echo $var;
}

Is there a method of looping this until the end of the array? As my arrays are nested within the main 'cart' array so that I can have multiple entries in the cart, I have had to insert a $i to catch the array number. I therefore need to extract the data from each array, and then increase this to get the next record. How will I tell it to stop?