If you use the Cart class that was introduced in CodeIgniter 1.7.2 very often, you’ll notice that it has some shortcomings. In particular, the update() method will only update the quantity of the item in the cart; it will not update other indexes.

This is troublesome because sometimes you may want to update the price, for example, if the quantity goes above a certain threshold. Suppose you want to give a 10% discount on an item to anyone who orders 10 or more of that item. As it stands, you would have to remove the item from the cart, calculate the discount for the item, and re-add the item with a different price. I have also ran into the problem when I added a flag index to items in the cart to which I needed to do additional processing during checking depending on its status. I’ve found in both cases that the better solution is to extend the cart class. Here is how we can do it.

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