Best way to build cart

Anon

ok, I am running into a delema here. I am currently in the process of building my own shopping cart (I know, "why re-invent the wheel" - 1. I need the practice with my PHP and MySQL 2. I would rather write my own script rather than trying to waste hours learning someone elses.)

The problem that I am having is exactly how should I handle the cart.

Should I :
A.) Create a session for each user and store the cart information in cookies, then upon checkout pump the contents into the database. (Preferable for me to limit connections to the database).

B.) Insert all new visitors into a temp table and store their session_id and cart choices in the database until checkout.

For me B is definitely the easiest to accomplish, However as I mentioned above I would like to limit connections to the DB and I believe that it will be less maintainance to store the information using session vars.

Currently I have not been able to get version A to work correctly.

Any thoughts or input on this matter are greatly appreciated!

Steve

Anon

Check out the code that comes with Juli Meloni's Book "PHP Essentials". It's a really versatile system which uses cookies to set a unique user id for each shopper.

Contents of cart are stored in a table, then deleted when checkout completes. Orders are delivered via email. Code is simple enough to be easily modified to do whatever you need.

I think you'll find most of the code you need here:

http://www.thickbook.com/srccode/index.phtml?b=pe&ch=pe8

Anon

Mark,

You are my new best friend! That is exactly what kind of information I was looking for. She gives an example of how to store all the information in session variables rather than pumping it into a database table.

Thanks again,

Steve

jcornett

Just beware of those who can't/won't use cookies. 🙂

I've got several shopping carts up that use MySQL exclusively for all storage of information and have had no problems with speed thus far.

Juli's book is great and a good starting point for PHP. If you pick up Professional PHP Programming from wrox (www.wrox.com) they also have a great e-commerce script set that utilizes a DB.

Good luck and let us know how things go!

John Cornett

Anon

Question,

Isnt there a way to store all the contents of the cart in a session variable? and then gain access to those items by calling the sessionid?

for instance a
file.php?action=add_item&product_id=001&PHPSESSID

So it would search the session_id find the contents and then update them? Or is that a rediculous way to go about doing this.

Steve

Anon

Steve,

No - you cannot store contents of the cart in a session variable. Why?

Well... Session variable contains an md5() hash to identify a user, the actual contents which session id identifies is stored on a server at /tmp directory.

Simply put it - session id is a cookie that is stored on a <b>client's computer</b>, but the contents which session id points to is <b>server side</b>.

Hope that helps,

Good thing to do is read manual about session functions,