you viewed items, strategy?

[sasori]

am currently building the cart system of a product, now there is this part wherein, the non-logged-in OR logged-in user should also be able to see the items that he/she viewed, how to do that?., am not asking for code snippets , just give me some ideas/hints/strategies/tips that may help me get the big picture on how to do this thing and proceed coding.

[PFMaBiSmAd]

You would use a session variable ($_SESSION['viewed'][n] = true;, where n is a product id) to remember the product id's that the person has viewed. To display the product information, use array_keys to get the list of id's from the $_SESSION['viewed'] array.

[sasori]

You would use a session variable ($_SESSION['viewed'][n] = true;, where n is a product id) to remember the product id's that the person has viewed. To display the product information, use array_keys to get the list of id's from the $_SESSION['viewed'] array.

 

ok, if that's the case, what if the person viewed alot of items? , i think it's uncool to paginate the data in the small box, what to do next ? or there's a better way?

[PFMaBiSmAd]

If you only want to keep a specific number of recent items, you would push the values onto the end of an array and only keep the last n items -

 

<?php
$n = 5; // number of recent items to remember

if(isset($_GET['id'])){
$id = (int)$_GET['id'];
if(!in_array($id,$_SESSION['viewed'])){
	$_SESSION['viewed'][] = $id;
	$_SESSION['viewed'] = array_slice($_SESSION['viewed'],-$n,$n); // keep last n entries
}
}

[l0gic]

You could also prioritize items that have been viewed multiple times so like above with the session variable, but instead of true/false have it count the number of times it's been viewed. I know personally I usually look at something and come back to it again several times before I buy online.

 

You could order from most viewed to least viewed and call it something like, "Other items you've recently been interested in."

[sasori]

ok guys,

 

I ended up with my own function

 

//from the class file

    public function displayItemViewed(){
      $image = '';
      $catid = '';
      foreach(array_keys($_SESSION['viewed']) as $item){
        $image = $this->getProductImage($item);
        $catid = $this->getCatByProductID($item);
        if(count($_SESSION['viewed']) <= 5){
          echo '<li>
                  <a alt="'.$item.'" title ="'.$catid["ProductName"].'"href="catalog-details.php?prod_id='.$item.'&cat_id='.$catid["ProductCatID"].'"><img src="module/newmodule/products/'.$image['ImageLocation'].'"></a>
                </li>';
        } else {
          array_shift($_SESSION['viewed']);
          reset($_SESSION['viewed']);
        }
      }
    }

 

 

//inside the you also viewed items box
                        <ul>
                            <?=$myCart->displayItemViewed();?>
                        </ul>

 

//from the product details page from where I set the session

$productid = $_GET['prod_id'];


if(isset($productid)){
    $_SESSION["viewed"][$productid] = true;
}

 

 

now my problem is, whenever i run everything...my function seem to display a 0 key?, when it shouldn't

that's why there are some instances where my "you also viewed items" has 1 item missing in the set of five ,

how to fix this ?