Hello,
I am developing a shopping cart project and stuck at the part of adding products to the shopping cart. Is it a best practice to use temporary tables for holding the items in the shopping cart.My view point is if the user leave the session before checking out or they wanted to view their cart summary before check out, can we store that data in a temporary table.I know that using temp table is not a good idea from the performance view point. Is there any better options available other than using a temp table. Your opinion is much appreciated
Thanks
Ann

It depends and your business rules should dictate it.

One approach would be to use a permananet table in your database to store shopping carts for X user much like you proposed in your original post. (There is no reason to use a Temp Table)

Your second approach could be to store the value in session. The easiest way to do this, IMHO, is to create a custom type and store a in session for each user. Your draw back here is that the shopping cart will be lost once the session times out or the browser is closed. (You could, of course, give the user the ability to save their shopping cart which you could then write to a database)

hth.

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