Hi

In the book, the persistent shopping cart is stored as a serializable class in the asp.net profile system. The book claims that this saves the user the time and trouble of writing their own tables and stored procedures for accessing the shopping cart.

I have never implemented a persistent shopping cart like this. What would you do if the product information has changed since the user last visited the website. I guess when you first load the stored shopping basket you could check the shopping basket against the database to see if the products still exist and if their prices are still the same. However, doesnt the very fact you have to check the shopping basket against the database negate any benefits of storing the basket in the asp.net profile rather than in its own database tables?

thanks very much
andrea

The aspnet_Profile table is data hungry with three large columns. The download has 500 rows - almost 1mb of data.

Thebeerhouse stores shoppingcart and user settings in this table so with say 10,000 users you would be looking at up to 20mb of data in one table.

Along with the fact that the persistent cart doesn't reflect any changes in stock qty or price, it looks like the data would be better maintained in specific tables.

Do customers want to see old items in their cart on the next visit anyway? Amazon keeps the old cart data but I personally find it a pain to clear out my old cart when I'm buying.