oracle, php, xml

[aix0]

I've just started to create an e-commerce site for the company that I work for. We want to have the functionality for a customer to log into a website and browse and buy product that exists in our existing Oracle DB. At present i've got it setup so that a when a customer adds a product to their basket it writes all the data to an XML file which is then processed at checkout and then saved.

I don't know if this is 'a done thing' or not. I was just wondering whether this was the way to go, the reason for saving an XML file was so that it could be used in other software / reports to analyze. I'm not really much of a web developer, more of an interfering techie. I was just wondering if this was the way to go or not? Any issues or problems that may arise in it functioning this way?

Thanks

 

[Dj_Jestar]

I'd use just tables instead of tables and XML files for the shop.

If you need to, knock up a page that will generate an XML page for the report, when the report is required.

It must be horrendously inefficient to write/read from a flat file everytime someone buys something?