Adding multiple items to a cookie (php)

[realm]

Hi,

Right i am working on a project where i need a POST value to add to a cookie which is fine as i have just done:

Code:

setcookie("product", $_POST[product]);
setcookie("product_select",$_POST[product_select]);

This works fine, but what i need to do is when this goes to the next section the user can either buy or add another product i need them to be able to add another product to this cookie so on the diplay page it shows all the products they have. Any idea how i am going to do this?

Cheers,
Adam

[aidanjt]

Use implode() to store an array of item ids in the cookie and explode() after reading $_COOKIE['product'].

See http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.implode.php for more info.

[yamangman]

Are you sure you want to use cookies here?

[TiG]

Agree with Yamangman here, why you using cookies to do something like this?.

Its not the way this should be achieved, cookies aren't shopping baskets and should be limited to what they are storing.

TiG

[McClane]

I'm not overly experienced with this kind of stuff as I've only done a couple of big projects using PHP but in a project for university I used session variables for my shopping basket. Personally I think that would be much better than using cookies and easier to implement.

[Iain]

It depends, cookies are widely used in shopping carts but commonly in conjunction with session vars. The reason being that if the user adds some items to their basket and then goes to browse somewhere else e.g. to review an item or because the shop has third parties they are reselling through, then session vars may not be viable and they aren't persistent.

In short, use both, first check for session vars and if they don't exist then check for cookies. There should be nothing in the cookie that is a security risk, just some product IDs. If you don't want to take the risk of multiple people sharing a PC then put a user key of some sort in the cookie, an md5 hash should of the username or something similar should be fine

[realm]

Thank you for your replys everyone.

Basically it is for only one product the product is a photo. The idea is people can upload their photo and they chose from different sizes etc and that will be sent to them on a canvas when the buy.

The customer can buy multiple images but will essentially be the same product just a different sizes and image for each one that is why i am using cookies to do this.

[moogle]

Agree with Yamangman here, why you using cookies to do something like this?.

Its not the way this should be achieved, cookies aren't shopping baskets and should be limited to what they are storing.

TiG

how else can you store the basket? reading the basket from the server is worse. storing it in mysql is worse. puts more load on the server and what about all the people who visit it. look at scan and ebuyer and dabs and every other shop they all use cookies to store your basket. for scan I add some today only's and next week i'll still have them there. only if i empty cache or clear cookies then it goes.