Persistance of Shopping Cart

 
55   94.1
Feb 03, 2011
 
As others before me I also would like some verification on the process of saving a cart - as I'm trying to implement some best practices in my development - and I stall over how I "should" be doing things.

If I were to venture a guess - I would pass the entire shopping cart & user back - and then just persist each item.  But my feeling and ignorance are telling me I'm missing something.  And then I get more insecure about the approach once we allow for updating of said orders.

The cart app isn't a perfect example - but let's say it was a recipe catalog - as they are similar.  I can create and save a recipe.  Then as I refine my recipe (at a later date) I can add/remove/update various ingredients.  Would it be a better approach to persist each ingredient to the DB as it happens?  Or to work with the recipe - and save it only at one time? 

If I persist as it happens - there's no "undo" capability.  Which would lead me to doing it all in the recipe "Save" type method.  But if that's the case - what would be a good ("best practice"?) approach to updating some ingredients, creating others, and removing non-existant ones in one process?  It seems to me that you could easily run into a number of DB calls.  Is that just the inevitability of it all?

I'm sure I'm missing the obvious, or over-reading into things - and would really appreciate any sort of slap in the head to snap me out of this!
 2 comments
 
Hi Andrew. In your recipe scenario, you should consider each RecipeIngredient i.e. a mapping between a recipe object and an ingredient object as a unit of work and persist / update / delete each recipeingredient in its own operation. Selecting the necessary ingredient persists the mapping (recipe > ingredient) and returns either the new list of ingredients, or a single ingredient which is then added to the DOM. From a usability point of view you could do this in an Ajax fashion so that a) the user experience is better b) you reduce the overhead in bringing other data / bindings on the page --- Greg Stevenson  Feb 09, 2011
 
Thanks Greg - I didn't notice any notification of your reply - hence my long delay in response. It makes sense and having your confirmation makes me feel all the better about it! Thanks again! --- Andrew Walker  May 12, 2011