Allow changes to item quantity in cart

[mnquintana]

Currently, if you have items in your cart and want to change the quantity of each one after you add them, you have these options:

• Keep clicking the Add to Cart button if you want more (but what if you navigated to a different catalog page?)
• If you want fewer items, remove the equipment model from the cart and then keep clicking the add to cart button for that equipment model until you get the number you want.
  • If you happen to click one too many times though, you're pretty screwed and have to start over.

Basically, this is insane UX. I don't think I've ever experienced a cart that didn't allow you to edit the quantity of each item in the cart. I'm actually kind of amazed we never caught this (inclusive we, 'cause I should've caught this too 😳). This is such an egregious UX fail that I'm marking it priority 3 and adding it to 5.1.0. Whoops. 😬

[orenyk]

Holy cow, this is an excellent point. I'm thinking we might have overlooked
it since our current clients almost never reserve more than one of a given
item. That said, we really need to fix it - we can either go with
plus/minus as UI elements or have a "count" field (that can optionally
autosubmit). This will all be redone when we implement #1061 but it
shouldn't be too hard to get something together.

[squidgetx]

The remove item button in the cart actually decrements the count of the item, so the process of adjusting an item quantity is not really THAT arduous IMO

• Added too many? Click remove until you have the amount you want
• Not enough? Click the name of the equipment model which takes you to its show page that has the add to cart button right there

I agree it's not ideal UX. However, I don't think its high enough priority to fix pre-#1061 since you know it would involve all kinds of janky extra routes, view modification and JS that would be much easier to work with post #1061

[mnquintana]

The remove item button in the cart actually decrements the count of the item

Really? Well... yeah that's still weird. But not quite as bad.

Alright, I'll knock this down to priority 2.

But, the only problem with waiting for #1061 is that that is going to be a massive rewrite of most of the app. One of the issues I've encountered with the Bootstrap upgrade is that the views are really really really brittle and highly coupled, and our controllers seem to know far too much about them. We are also going to have to essentially recreate many features from scratch, which will take a good while.

So I mean, as long as we think waiting until quite possibly May / end of summer is fine, then I think it would be fair to call this (and other new features that would require any non-trivial amount of JS) blocked on #1061.

[squidgetx]

I agree (a lot) with your statement that the views are extremely brittle and highly coupled. That's why I kind of don't want to touch/add to any of it until #1061 haha

[orenyk]

Good call @squidgetx, I didn't read the original description properly.

My take is that it would be fairly simple to replace the "Remove" buttons with "plus" and "minus" buttons that at least make the functionality clearer and allow for increasing of item counts from the cart. This shouldn't require additional routes or controller methods since we're already performing those operations through the various "Add to Cart" buttons and the already present "Remove" from multiple places in the app. Then, once we get #1061 done, we can implement a proper cart with the ability to edit the counts of multiple items simultaneously perhaps and change counts by more than 1 at a time. Does that seem like a reasonable approach?

[connormcl]

Alright so I have a working solution for this issue with "plus" and "minus" buttons in the cart that increment and decrement the item quantities. It works on any page where the cart is displayed. However, I need to do some refactoring because there is code in the cart view that should really belong in a controller. The key to this issue was getting an "availability_hash" available to the cart view so that it knows how high it can increment item quantities before disabling the plus button. There is a similar availability_hash prepared by the application_controller that is used within the catalog listing of equipment, but this variable does not work within the cart. This is because it includes only items that are being listed on the current page of the catalog, which does not necessarily include the items in the cart (if the user navigates to a different page).

[connormcl]

Also, all this digging around looking at how these various "add" buttons behave lead me to discover that said buttons to not correctly disable on the individual item page. As in, if there are 3 equipment objects available for a listed equipment model in the catalog, and I add all three items to my cart, the "add" button disables in the catalog, and my "plus" button disables in the cart. If I then navigate to the individual equipment model page, the "add" button there is still active and I can keep adding to the cart forever. Should I make this a new issue? Once I figure out the cleaner version of my current solution, I could probably also fix this other issue quickly.