Shopping cart help

Rails
1

I’m in the process of learning rails, and am trying to implement
something kind of like a shopping cart in my application. Basically,
I want users to be able to kind of have a “wish list” of the products
in the store. Right now, users can browse through the list of items
for sale and add them to a cart. I’m stuck at the point of trying to
grab the list of items from the session and save them for future
viewing.

I’ve looked at the shopping cart example in Agile Web D. w/
Rails, which helped get me to the point I’m currently at. However,
the example of capturing an order doesn’t really fit with what I’d
like to be able to do. It doesn’t seem as if I need the “order” and
“line_items” models, but instead should save the list of products
under a “wish list” table for the users to come back and look at. I’m
thinking that it should minimally contain a column for the title of
the wish list (what the user names it), plus a list of the ids of the
products they have saved. Any suggestions? Do I need to have an
equivalent “line_items” model, or can I just reference the ids of the
products in my “wish list” table? How do I go about saving that and
then displaying that in a unique url for the user to browse back to in
the future? Thanks for the help.

2

Why wouldn’t you have another link/button that reads “Add to Wishlist”
and when the buyer clicks on it, the item is added to the list.
You will need a table for a wishlist with 2 colums: id and customer_id
and a table for wishlist_items with these columns:
t.column :product_id, :integer
t.column :cart_id, :integer
t.column :price, :float
t.column :amount, :integer
t.column :created_at, :datetime

then your relationships should be:
wishlist:
has_many :cart_items
has_many :products, :through => :cart_items
belongs_to :custome

customer:
has_one: wishlist

Then, you can add the items from the session to the wishlist.

How to add the functionality to move the items in the cart to the
wishlist, I still not sure how to do (new to rails as well).
But the above works for me, so the items in the cart stay till the
next time the customer logs in (with the use of an authentication
system.)

HTH,
Elle

3

Check out RailsCart…

http://groups.google.com/group/railscart?lnk=li
http://code.google.com/p/railscart/
http://railscart.org/

HTH - Dave P.

4

Thanks for the input. What I don’t understand is why there needs to
be another wishlist_items table. Wouldn’t that mean that with every
add to your wishlist there is a new row in a separate table that just
points products to a wishlist? I just see the wishlist_items table
growing to be very large. Is there a way to direct a product directly
into a wishlist without having to have a middle step?

So basically, is there a way to do it without having to have a
wishlist_items point a product id to a wishlist id – could the
wishlist just contain the list of products itself without an in
between? It would only really need a user_id and a product_list,
avoiding any redundant entries (like price, quantity, etc which is
done at checkout anyways).

Thanks again.