customizable shopping cart items - how to construct?

[sysadmin42]

hello. I am about to make a shopping cart. What I want to do is have each item have the power to do different things if they're in the cart. i.e. There's a website subscription item. After confirmed payment, it should insert the new subscription into the database. Or, there's a renewal item, it should use a different script to update the account in the db.

So far, all I can think of is to make a field in the db contain a script filename for each item, have a main script that loops through and calls each script until the cart is empty. Is this a good way?

What are your thoughts on how to go about the architecture of this cart?

 

[sleipnir214]

I wouldn't store the script in the session. Why not just have a script parse the cart and do what's needed?


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[sysadmin42]

that's kinda what I'm thinking. What steps would be a good way to parse the cart?

 

[sleipnir214]

Store in the cart a machine-meaningful token that describes the type of transaction the record represents. (This information would not be displayed to the user, but rather only used by the script.) Your action script would run through the items in the cart, reacting to the transaction-type token and using associated information in the record as the details of what to do.

The token could be numbers (1 means subscribe, 2 means renew, etc) or some kind of string. I'd probably go with numbers.


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[sysadmin42]

I see. Thanks a lot!