Hi everyone,

I'm a self-taught newbie who's looking to develop (using VB Script) a "wish list" feature for an online tourism agency, but not sure what to do.

It needs to work some like this: the visitor views events, places to stay, things to do, etc. and is given the option to add that item to a wish list of things to do when they visit that area. The visitor could save their list by creating an account.

So, I guess my questions are:

1. Would a wish list be built just like a shopping cart?

2. If so, what database should I use and how would it be set up? (I really don't have much experience with databases yet.)

3. If not, how would I go about doing this?

4. Does anyone know of a Wish List script that's available?

Any help and code examples would be really appreciated as I feel pretty lost and overwhelmed with this task.

Thanks,
Steve

Yeah this is essentially a shopping cart. The database will depend on the machine hosting it, but any database can work. I would go with one that supports referential integrity (keys). The idea is that you are going to have three tables. One will be for the user's account and has an account ID that is assigned to them when they signup (this can be a auto_incrementing primary key). A table that has all the items you have for the site which each item has their own item id and another which will keep a list of IDs for items in their wishlist. You don't have to store much more information in the wishlist table than the items unique key id because then you could use that ID in a query to pull the items information as needed.



As you can see the user_wishlist table has a link to the userID and a link to ItemID. This table can have multiple ItemIDs for each userID and will look like...



This above says that wishlist for user 3 has two items, item 10 and item 22. User 4 has item 10 only. I hope that part makes some sense.

I was not able to find any article that gave you the simple relationship here because it is pretty elementary database design but you can look at shopping cart table design or the classic "order/item" table design which fits very close with this. Just replace order with the idea of a wishlist.

I hope this information helps.

Thank you Martry2, this really helps although I'm still a bit confused. I'll probably use MySql for the db, would this work in regards to the "referential integrity (keys)"? If so, I can set up the tables, but do I need to make a relationship between each table so that they know where to pull information from? (I may be wording this completely wrong.) I'm assuming I would use a loop (or similar statement) to find each instance of the user_id and display each item that's been found? If so, do I need to do anything with the ID in the user_wishlist table?

Never mind. I have it working now.