Open URL Internally in PHP Code w/o Open Window - Shop Cart

PHP programming forum. Ask questions or help people concerning PHP code. Don't understand a function? Need help implementing a class? Don't understand a class? Here is where to ask. Remember to do your homework!

Moderator: General Moderators

Post Reply
drsmartman
Forum Newbie
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:27 pm

Open URL Internally in PHP Code w/o Open Window - Shop Cart

Post by drsmartman »

Hi All,

I have an off-site shopping cart that I want to inegrate with my site. In it's simplest form, I would simply have a link to a product and the user would be taken off-site to my shopping cart. However, I'd like to integrate a form to allow multiple purchases to happen at once. To do this, I need to a.) hit each URL to assign each specific product to the shopping cart, then b.) put a checkout on my site that brings them to the off-site URL for payment.

I used the code below just to test, but after accessing the link, it didn't work....In production, this file would receive a POST message with any products selected.....(e.g. Product 1, Product 2)

<?php

//fopen()
fopen("link to product","rb");

// or I used file_get_contents()
file_get_contents("link to product");

?>

<a href="link to cart checkout">checkout</a>

When I do this process manually, it works, but this very simple example will not work. I also got it to work in javascript, but want to do this on the server-side. Any ideas?

By the way, by working I mean I access the product URL (or several of them) then go to the main checkout URL and all of my products are listed. My assumption is that the offline site uses cookies or sessions...would 'fopen()' of 'file_get_contents()' not set the cookie? How come I can in Javascript? I guess my question is a.) how can I open a page in PHP without opening a window, but setting a cookie from that URL or b.) another way around this?

Thanks in advance!
User avatar
tim
DevNet Resident
Posts: 1165
Joined: Thu Feb 12, 2004 7:19 pm
Location: ohio

Post by tim »

Seems (sorry to be such a generic answer but I have to leave soon) that you should intergrate a MySQL database to store the products in your cart and manage to imply sessions.

I think those would be your best ways, correct me if i'm wrong anyone.

again sorry i am not going into detail
drsmartman
Forum Newbie
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:27 pm

Post by drsmartman »

Yeah, I think my question wasn't too clear, but that's not what I'm looking for. We already have another site that acts as a shopping cart/checkout system. So, in order for me to add multiple products to one checkout, I need to access a URL for each product. However, it is not very usable to buy one product at a time so when the customer clicks "checkout" they leave my site and see all of the items listed in their shopping cart. Essentially, I just need something on the server-side (PHP) that acts like 'document.open()' in javascript (with parameters for NOT opening a window). I thought 'fopen()' or 'file_get_contents()' would do the trick.....

thanks anyway
drsmartman
Forum Newbie
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:27 pm

Post by drsmartman »

I guess one of the main problems is because accessing those links sets a cookie value. By attempting to do this through PHP, the browser never accesses the cookie. Ugh....anyway around this dilemna?
d3ad1ysp0rk
Forum Donator
Posts: 1661
Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2003 8:31 pm
Location: Maine, USA

Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

iframes? :\

can't think of much.. too bad the checkout isn't on your site.. and I don't know why it isnt.. but too bad :P
drsmartman
Forum Newbie
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:27 pm

Post by drsmartman »

I tried to find if there was just a big URL I could pass with all of the product IDs/quantities, but nothing going. Oh, and the cookie thing IS the problem. No, the shopping cart software is no on site. For example, clicking a product buy button would theoretically go from my site to http://othersite.com/product=xyz, then to checkout. However, instead of only having product xyz, I'd like to have abc, def, etc....the other site accomplishes this through cookies. Back to the drawing board....
Post Reply