Joomla Sessions and VirtueMart Cart - how to save cart information

Question

I'm trying to extend the lifetime of the shopping cart for guest users up to a couple of days. So that if a user comes back his shopping cart it filled again with the products he has prev. selected.

What I figured so far is:

The VirtueMart Cart stores it's cart-information in the field "data" in the table "_session". When I extend the session-lifetime in joomla general settings, I can achieve that these entries are stored for let's say 5 days.

Now I believe that I only have to alter the VM-Objects to:

1. Check if cookie is already on user's mashine
2. read the session_id out of the cookie and find the session info in table "_session" then read information into shopping cart.

If no cookie present proceed as usual.

Now I don't know if this is something I have to change on joomla's session handling or something in the VM component.

Has anybody tried something like this before? Other solution ideas?

Answer 1

I found a solution for the cart saving problem. With this plugin you could handle saved carts (alter / delete them from backend). www.awebsupport.com , and the backend version: http://awebsupport.com/virtuemart-cart-watching-system