Building a shopping cart for an asp.net 2.0 website...

Darragh29

Hi folks,

I've built a website that has a large product catalog on an MS Server 2005 DB. Users can browse the DB using a 3 level drop down menu. The menu data is held in an xml file on the web server and when the user uses the 3 level drop down menu, the 3 sets of data selected in each drop down list (layer 1,2 and 3), looks for a similar set of values in the DB across 3 different fields. If one matching record is found in respect of the 3 sets of comparable data, the complete data record from the DB is returned to the screen and stored in variables.

What I want to do now is add an item to a shopping cart if the customer wants to buy and add another item or delete an item and so on...

I've done this previously using PHP and I used session variables to implement the solution and it did what it said on the tin.

I'm wondering should I use the same approach with asp.net 2.0 or should I possibly look at using the DB to build a shopping cart solution, by referencing my DB by indexing items using a SessionID variable?

All advice very much appreciated...

D.

gmitStu

Use a database.

The users cart can be saved to a cart table, with thier session ID as the primary key. This way you will build up a reposatory of carts that people have bought and more importantly were thinking of buying.

Once you get enough records, you could even use it to implement some kind of analyisis on the un-bought carts, what products users were pricing up, the affinities between the products etc.

I think in general it's better to use a database for a total shopping cart solution, with tables like product, category, cart, order, user etc.

Darragh29

Many thanks for the reply. I've done this now and everytime I query my DB through the dropdown list, I get back a different (I'm assuming a new), session ID from the server. Is there a parameter I need to set in my config.web file that stops this from happening???