[ic] different cart, different price

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org (John Allman)]

Hi - I have a situation now where  i have two shopping baskets, one for 
orders coming from a catalog (a physical catalog like a magazine) and 
one for orders coming in from the website as usual. The codes in the 
catalog (from here on assume when i say catalog i mean the actual 
magazine type thing) are different from the sku's in the product table 
so i'm intending to have a little perl code in a variable (lets call 
this variable translate) to look up a table in the database and 
translate from catalog code to sku. I then would have something like 
<input type=hidden name=mv_click value=translate> in my form for 
ordering. i'm hoping this makes sense so far.

problem is that the products listed in the catalog might have slightly 
different prices to those on the live website (if, for example the 
prices on the website were changed). so my plan is to have an extra 
field in this "catalog code to sku translation table" with the price 
listed in it. now the problem arises that when i get to the shopping 
basket page i need to know the catalog code in order to get the correct 
price, but i've already translated it into an sku to place the order.

i'm thinking of adding the catalog code for each order into a perl array 
which will be stored as a scratch variable. Then when i'm iterating 
through the products in the basket, i can keep a count and look at each 
corresponding catalog code in turn and use this to look up the 
appropriate price for the current item. does this sound like a sensible 
way to do things? i also briefly considered storing the price in a cgi 
variable - but somebody could abuse this reasonably easily and claim 
whatever price they wanted for a product.

If anyone can offer me any advice or make any comments on the approach 
i've proposed i'd much appreciate it.

thanks

John