Add 2 different products (no attributes) to cart at one time via hardcode link

[makenoiz]

1.5.1.
Lots and lots of customizations ;}

I am doing some custom coding and coding a link such as this:

mysite.com/index.php?main_page=products_new&action=buy_now&products_id=107230

It works great but I need to add both products_id=107230 and products_id=107231 at the same time.


Can it be done? If I need custom coding... where would you recommend I start.

Thanks!

[Ajeh]

Can you post URLs to these two product_id so we can see the Products and consider the Products and how best to answer this?

[makenoiz]

Im on a development server not accessible to the public... but they are basically 1 mit and 1 baseball both from the same category of 'baseball' which is a sub category of parent cat 'sports'. There are no attributes and quantity will always be 1 of each.

dev://mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=317_321&products_id=107230
dev://mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=317_321&products_id=107231
parent cat 317 = 'sports'
cat 321 = 'baseball'
products_id=107230 = starter baseball
products_id=107231 = starter mit

I hope this will help you to help me ;)

thank you very much....

P.S. I was thinking of adding a session variable as a flag for the cart page. if the cart page sees that the session Varriable is not null (it would contain the second products_id) then if sessionVarrialbe not Null use javascript to window.location the second buy_now link from the cart. this seems like overkill tho... there must be a simpler way?

[DrByte]

A few options:

a) consider the Better Together plugin in case it suits your needs and saves you writing code needlessly

b) in a fresh install of Zen Cart, on the product-listing page in any category, the Multiple Add To Cart feature is active by default, and that presents a form that also presents qty input boxes for several items, and has submit buttons which submit those quantities for each of those products, which then triggers the code in the /includes/main_cart_actions.php file (custom changes or additions to that would NOT be put in that file, but instead in the extra_cart_actions folder) to take the submitted product ids and quantities and pass them to the shopping cart class to handle the actual insertion.
So, if your customization is on a non-zen-cart page you could mimic the multiple-item-form-submit.
Or you could intercept the cart-actions processing with your own extra-cart-actions code to check whether a certain product is being added and have it also add another one. For what it's worth I believe this is basically what the better-together plugin does ... but if I'm wrong about that, then what I've just described is how you can do what you've stated.

c) or you could hack up the code and make upgrades more complicated in the future. I don't recommend this if there are more efficient ways to accomplish the same end result.

[makenoiz]

Yes I try very hard to stay away from 'c'! Our upgrades right now take 2 days and BeyoneCompare is my very very best friend during those 2 days! But the boss is the boss .. ya know.. I dont think 'a' will work with the application so I will put my efforets into 'b'. For some reason I thought Multiple Add To Cart feature was no longer supported... Great idea...

Thanks!

[swguy]

@makenoiz - see your PM.