[mv] Re: Catalog1.01 (Perl Module) and Minivend ... previous thread [mv] Design for Performance - is it possible?

["kyle@invisio.com" <kyle@invisio.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from "kyle@invisio.com" <kyle@invisio.com>     ******

Liviu,

Assuming you have Minivend set to use cookies, then
users with their cookies enabled should not have a problem.

But if they have their cookies disabled, they will lose the cart
if they link into a new catalog page from outside of MV.

I have been able to prevent that when linking out to a cgi script
by passing the session identifier to the cgi script, then when it
redirects (or builds an html page with links) it makes a link into
the catalog with the session id.

Example:
you are on a page in the mv catalog:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/sample?6W9w6pjq

You want to link to a cgi script:

<FORM NAME="form1"
ACTION="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi"; METHOD=POST>
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" name="session" VALUE="[data session id]">
<othe form fields ....></FORM>

-OR-

<a href="/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?session=[data session
id]&othervars=whatever">link</a>

then in somescript.cgi be sure to grab the session id
then do whatever in your script and when you display
a link or redirect back to the catalog include it like
this:

# $session is the var you saved the session id in when script was called
print "<a href=\"/cgi-bin/sample?$session\">To a mv page</a>";

So if you feel comfortable spending the time to modify your perl module
it can be done.

The only other choice is to only allow shopping if the customer has
cookies turned on (REDUCED SALES!)

Kyle Cook (KC)

At 03:09 PM 1/21/00 -0800, you wrote:
>******    message to minivend-users from Liviu Chiriac <lchiriac@ntkcom.com> 
>    ******
>
>
>I installed the Catalog1.01 perl module, which is a cgi script which lets 
>you build an online
>catalog, like Yahoo for example. The data is stored in a Mysql database, and 
>one can create
>different catalog views based on the same data.
>http://www.senga.org/Catalog/current/doc/catalog_toc.html
>
>I created some simple catalogs (for testing), and now I plan to integrate 
>them with minivend, such
>that after they decide on an item that they want to buy, they call minivend 
>and add it to the
>shopping cart.
>
>However, if they go back and browse the catalog, since it is a separate cgi 
>program (i.e.. not
>minivend), it looks like I will lose all the session variables, and I lose 
>the cart info because of
>that. (I think the documentation mentions this).
>
>Is this right ? or with the use of cookies I can avoid it?
>
>If  indeed I lose the cart info, is there a trick to make this work and to 
>share these session/cart
>variables for different cgi script?
>
>Thanks in adv.,
>    Liviu
>
>
>> >Will I be better of using a catalog for each leaf subdirectory? I think
>> >I can end up with a huge number of Catalogs, and minivend may not handle
>> >all of them efficiently. Any thoughts on this?
>
>-
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