[mcrob]

Hey there I have a question...

I was thinking of having this. If a user is not registered on the website, if this user adds a product to the cart, he or she has to be logged in to use this feature. I also found a website that does the same.

http://www.traxsource.com

Do you believe this could be a problem or no?

[Jay6390]

Not quite sure what you are asking here. Do you mean that you think having a shopping cart that people can use whilst not logged in is a problem? If all items are stored in session variables, I dont think it is all that important, because you can force the user to log in when they have finished their shopping and go to checkout. Then they sign in and all their cart is saved still

[mcrob]

I was thinking if the user is not logged in, they won't be able to save the products to the shopping cart....

[Jay6390]

They wont be able to save the shopping cart no, but it will be held by the session until it expires. Once the user has logged in, you could save the cart, but you cant really without their username

[mcrob]

This is what I was thinking.....

I went on a couple of shopping cart websites and I learned what a lot of them to do is
when a customer adds a product to there shopping cart, because a sessionID was
made for them, it creates a cookies and stores the given sessionID in the cookies and the products that they add to there shopping cart gets stored in the database. So when the customer closes the browser and comes back let's say in 2 days (plus it all depends on when the cookie expires too) and the products are still in there shopping cart since it loaded the sessionID from there computer and in the database there sessionID it stored there which pulls up all the products they saved from before. Now that I understand this what if the customer decides not to come back? What kind of script could I use that would delete there saved product from the database after a certain time?

[blinn_shade]

I wouldn't bother with storing the shopping cart data for non-logged in users in the database. Store it in a session array. Thats the best way, but for logged in users it is best to store in the database.

[mcrob]

Actually just made an edit on this post here. I opened this shopping cart tutorial and I noticed this the programmer made a function to delete the abandoned cart that has
been one day old or more.

PHP Code:

function deleteAbandonedCart()



{



    $yesterday = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', mktime(0,0,0, date('m'), date('d') - 1, date('Y')));



    $sql = "DELETE FROM tbl_cart



            WHERE ct_date < '$yesterday'";



    dbQuery($sql);        



} 

I kind of need a better understanding of how this works. How can I make it so its expires in 5 days instead of 1 day?

[blinn_shade]

PHP Code:

function deleteAbandonedCart()



{



    $yesterday = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', mktime(0,0,0, date('m'), date('d') - 5, date('Y')));



    $sql = "DELETE FROM tbl_cart



            WHERE ct_date < '$yesterday'";



    dbQuery($sql);        



} 

but I still say using an session array would be best. Because if you have the cookie set to five days it will expire all the same and also the sessions stored on the server gets deleted after a certain amount of time.

[mcrob]

ok.. are there any examples of using an session array in a php shopping cart?

[blinn_shade]

http://www.php-shopping-cart-tutoria...pping-cart.htm

I searched google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=usi...t+php+tutorial