Customer losing session while building options on external site

Okay, so the next part of this is for a client. He has a design app integrated into zen cart which times out. It would be super to have this for the cart itself. Most folks don't really need it but to be able to make it work on the design page would make my client very very happy.

I haven't looked at the Admin Keepalive Timer mod itself. Could it be adapted for this use?

The keepalive timer only works when the browser window is present and open. But it sounds like your customers are on another site before being sent back to the store, so that bypasses the whole way that the keepalive tool works.

Have you considered the Cookie Cart plugin?

Actually they've integrated this pretty well. While on the product info page, they end up linking to a flash designer - looks like from another site. (I've asked questions to get more detail) but it pops up in a light box type container and if you "save" the design, it asks you to login to your account. The saving or loading simply places info into the attribute text boxes but doesn't add the product to the cart. So then it ends up timing out cause it is a zen cart session when they take too long or else leave it and come back to add it to the cart later.

The cookie cart can be handy but not in this case. Also found another handy tool while looking for the plugin. I'm really wanting an RSS feed or something when another plugin gets added or changed. No way to keep with some of the nifty stuff that's appeared!

So I have to literally rethink this whole thing. Being able to save the info to a cookie would be a solution so I'll take a look at the cookie cart. I have not worked with cookies much at all before so right now it sounds daunting.

Getting this one thing done tho may in the end create a usable interface - I've had folks ask for something similar literally since day one! It is a commercial solution but we tried a number of them and this works pretty dang good.

Any other thoughts?

You could have the flash app do its own keepalive ping to keep the session alive. Of course, that'd mean having whoever wrote the flash app do some alterations to it, like simply pinging the store's index.php page and just ignoring the results. Granted, that'll affect counter hits numbers, so be aware of that caveat.

When I mentioned that possibility to the developer, he said he was agreeable but neither of us knows how to do that. What I have found out is that all of the design work is taking place essentially on another website - in a jquery lightbox iframe sort of thing. The only interaction at the moment is to "save" the design by inserting the values into the attributes text boxes (proving that we can and do have some interaction with the cart itself.

So he would need to add code that pings the index.php with the session id attached, correct? That sounds pretty basic to me even if I haven't done it. Seems to be he could set up a time code that pings every 10 minutes automatically. Does that sound feasible?

Yes .