I have done both. It really depends on what the client wants and the hosting
environment. I did one where the items were held in a temporary database
table with a UUID simply because the client wanted to make sure that the
customer could come back to their items if they either changed their minds
later on or if something happened like their computer shut down
unexpectedly. I put a time/date stamp on the cart and would purge the cart
after 5 days.
We also set it up so that if a registered (i.e. logged in customer) was
shopping and they did not finalize their purchase, it would kick an email to
them saying that they still had items in their cart and that they were going
to be deleted in x days, and gave them a link to go back to the site and
decide if they wanted to buy the items.
I personally favor the holding of the items myself for the reason you said
below, if something happens, you don't want the customer to have to go back
and put all their items back into the cart. That would be a fast way to get
me away from your site.
Bruce
On 9/17/07, Les Mizzell wrote:
>
> I'm building a small shopping cart for a client - seems quicker to go
> from scratch than try to wrestle something already built back into our
> specific needs. Although I've done a couple of these, I was just
> wondering...
>
> What would the rest of you consider the optimal way to store items
> before checking out?
>
> Session var with an array?
> A temporary "holding database" for the items with just a UUID Session
> Var to keep up with the owner?
>
> I'm leaning towards the array in a session var - but this is on a shared
> server and I've seen sessions time out unexpectedly before, which
> wouldn't be good ("where'd all my stuff go???").
>
> Anybody else?
>
>
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