[thelist] shopping carts

[Matthew Walker]

Hey, here's a general design question. I'm not stumped, just looking for the
"best" way.

When you're building a shopping cart, how much facility do you allow for
product options (size, colour....)?

There could be any number of independent options but that could get out of
hand real quick. So I was thinking just one set of options that could if
necessary incorporate more than one dimension...e.g.

	option 1: red XL
	option 2: red M
	option 3: red S
	option 4: green XL
	.
	.
	.

That seems sensible. But then what about products with no options? Do you
have one option in the ProductOptions table or just not bother? I'm
expanding a cart that doesn't have product options at all. I'm thinking
perhaps I should rewrite the cart so that it stores the ProductOptionIDs in
the Cart rather than currently where I have ProductID then the
ProductOptionID  beneath that (I'm using a CF Struct -- which, for the
non-CF folk, is the same kind of data structure as the Windows registry).
That makes it tricky to count up the quantities, subtotal, etc.

In short, it turns out specifying options for products while simple in
concept really changes things structurally. Wish I'd known that from the
beginning.