Shopping Cart Disaster

HELP! Cart stopped calculating

[5stars]

Does anyone know what would cause a shopping cart done in asp to out of the blue stop calculating?

Mine did just that and I can’t figure out why. My host says it’s not the server. I have not updated that part of the website in weeks.

It is pulling the price from the database, but when you add the items to the cart it shows a 0.00 balance.

Any help would be most appreciated.

[5stars]

Well I figured out that it was the database. I uploaded a backup of the database and the cart started working again. :-) Phew!

So now my questions are...

1)What would cause a database to become corrupt?

2)And is there any quick fix you guys can share in case this happens again.

The backup database is missing about 2 weeks worth of sales, which I can import, but if there is a quick way to fix a corrupt database I would love to know.

[danieljean]

ack! what database were you using?

If it's very important you should at least have it backed up daily; if it's critical and you're dealing with a lot of money, it may be time to invest in a cheap RAID.

[5stars]

Hi danieljean,

I am running access... I tried to compact a repair it but that did work...

What is a RAID?

Thanks again!

[danieljean]

Redundant array of inexpensive disks- basically a way to have multiple disks, so if one fails you still have a back-up copy. Never mind that for now.

The problem could be with the ASP code, Access or even a hacker (unlikely). Can you figure out when you first started losing data? Do you have any logs that show unusual errors for that day?

You might want to ask another ASP programmer to look over your code to see if any strange possibility could cause sales to be zeroed or erased.

This is the first time I hear of anyone using Access for a shopping cart. It seems to me a relational database would be better suited; MSSQL or MySQL would probably be much more stable.

HTH

[5stars]

I am clueless as to what happened. But an upgrade may be in order. I do have a backup procedure that will automatically backup the database when I logoff the database. But it will only work if I log off and I got slack and didn’t always do that. : o but I will!
I know that the corruption occurred in a table that contained only prices and product ID's which I found very odd. I would have expected it to be one of the files that is written to. This table isn't.

I looked for missing records and could not find any. I did not see any records that contained invalid characters like ######

But as soon as I replace that table... it started working... which makes sense since Viewcart.asp (that page that does the preliminary calculations) only pulls data from this table.

I hope it wasn’t a hack. I don’t even know how I would find out if it was.

Julia