Simple Cart "Continue" Button

Hi Perch,

Since it's possible for users to disable HTTP_REFERER in their browsers, I always prefer to explicitly set return URLs with query strings or form data. You can use thisPageUrl() to get a link to the current page. In a link (for example, the ones in examples/sc-cart-add.php), you can do this:

<a href="<?php echo $addLink ?>&returnUrl=<?php echo htmlencode(urlencode(thisPageUrl())) ?>">Add to cart</a>

...or, in a form (also from the same page):

<input type="hidden" name="returnUrl" value="<?php echo htmlencode(thisPageUrl()) ?>">

Then, you'll need to process that and store it. In general, cookies are more reliable than sessions (due to various server configurations), so I'd suggest using them. Note that both the links and the forms on sc-cart-add.php both submit to sc-cart-add.php, which then redirects to sc-cart.php: be careful that you're not trying to capture the returnUrl after the browser has already been redirected and the query string has been lost. We'll need to capture the returnUrl before that redirect happens, so add this to the (very) top the target page (e.g. sc-cart-add.php):

// record returnUrl, if provided
if (@$_REQUEST['returnUrl']) {
  setcookie('returnUrl', $_REQUEST['returnUrl'], strtotime('+10 years'), '/');
}

Now you can use the cookie's value as the target URL on your cart pages (e.g. sc-cart.php). Note that I'm defaulting the URL to / with coalesce() below:

<?php $returnUrl = coalesce(@$_COOKIE['returnUrl'], '/') ?>
<a href="<?php echo htmlencode($returnUrl) ?>">Back to <?php echo htmlencode($returnUrl) ?></a>

You can test this by adding a junk query string to your page with the add link/form (e.g. sc-cart-add.php?hello), then making sure that the resulting link goes back to your unique url (e.g. ?hello).

Hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Chris -

Thanks for your help. I'm having some success with your method - but something is a bit quirky!

I can only set the cookie if one hasn't been set already. Once set it cannot be over-written. So it works the first time - but then just comes up with the same URL thereafter until I clear the cookie manually.

:0/

Perch

Hi Perch,

That's peculiar. Do you have a URL I can check out to see the problem?

Hi, Chris -

Try to buy this product:

http://www.zimouk.co.uk/index.php?prod=6

Perch

Hi, Chris -

I had a trawl around the Tinternet and found some useful info. The issue seems to boil down to is the if() statement around the code.

if (@$_REQUEST['returnUrl']) {
  setcookie('returnUrl', $_REQUEST['returnUrl'], strtotime('+10 years'), '/');
}


The $_REQUEST array contains all request variables, including both GET and COOKIE values. So, if the COOKIE has been set then the value of returnUrl is just replacing itself - or something like that!

Anyhow, I have added the following to the top of my product pages and it seems to work:

$return = htmlencode(thisPageUrl());
setcookie('returnUrl', $return, strtotime('+10 years'), '/')

:0)

Perch

Hah! That's a clever solution!

Glad you got his working! :)