Posted in osCommerce-Blog
August 21st, 2007 by Harald Ponce de Leon
The Product Attributes implementation for the 3.0 Alpha 5 release is being replaced with a new cleaner and flexible solution called Product Variants. This extends the previous Product Attributes feature by creating separate product records for each variant and assigning them to one master product. This allows the quantity, price, model, weight, status, and other product data information to be assigned distinctively to each variant a product has. As each variant has its own product record, referencing a product with a specific variant combination is easily performed with the product ID. This is an extreme improvement over the previous implementation where specific attribute combinations were referenced with a string value containing the product ID and the various attribute group and attribute value IDs (eg, 14{2}14{5}256). Here is a short QuickTime movie demonstrating how Product Variants are defined on the Administration Tool and how they are handled on the Online Store:
http://blogs.oscommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/osc30a5-variants.mov
The Administration Tool product listing identifies products containing variants and graphically distinguishes the records to normal product records: osCommerce Online Merchant Administration Tool Product Listing The price range for the product variants (the minimum and maximum prices) are shown in the product listing as well as the number of total quantities the master product has. Defining variants for a product can be performed by clicking on an “Add Variant” action button and by double clicking on the variant values to add: osCommerce Online Merchant Administration Tool Product Variants The product variant combinations are held within javascript values and are first saved (or deleted) when saving the product record. The Online Store also distinguishes between normal products and products with variants by showing either the full product price for normal products, or the minimum price for products with variations: osCommerce Online Merchant Product Variant Pricing The Product Variants feature has been freshly committed to my subversion development branch and will be merged to trunk as soon as the implementation is finalized. The interaction with product variants on the product information page is being finalized and will be showcased later this week with another blogging entry. If you’re keeping up to date with my development branch, please take a look at the changes and provide feedback on the community forums. Thanks!
