I am working on a custom Magento module to enter Composer information (name, bio, birth, death, etc.) and associate products (songs) with the composer. The module contains two tabs, one for the general info and the other for a list of the products (songs). The association should work exactly as the functionality of Related Products, Up-sells, and Cross-sells in the Product editing page. I feel like I've been running around in circles on a few points in regards to paging through the available songs and selecting and saving the entries. It's mainly dealing with the Grid Serialization. I've looked through as many resources as I can find, including several tutorials, without any luck:
http://magebase.com/magento-tutorials/understanding-the-grid-serializer-block/
I've posted the relevant files at this Gist and would appreciate any feedback or discussion. The files have a lot of material commented out from trying various solutions but they may prove useful in terms of thought process. Certainly available to post any other files that may be relevant.
I think this answer is exactly what you need. I know that single link answers are not very appreciated but the answer is kind of long to replicate in here.
You can also use this module creator to create you module (also available on magento connect). It has an UI that let's you create the modules in a similar way with how you create a table using phpMyAdmin. For each entity you create in your module you have the ability to say "Link many to many with products". This will create the the relation table between products and your entity and the second tab in the admin where you can choose products that are associated with your entity. Exactly like the products in the categories or like related products.
I admit that I'm the developer of the extension, but this should not be considered as spam since the extension is free and I get no profit out of it.
Related
I have an e-commerce site that provides made-to-order clothing. I've created a configurable product and just one associated product.
Is it possible to display all of the possible attribute combinations within just one associated product rather than manually add every combination?
I've tried allowing out of stock products to be displayed, but this didn't show all of the possible combinations.
I'm not hugely experienced with Magento, but I've used many CMS systems and inventory management products. I've never once seen a matrix / configurable / multi-variation / whatever you want to call it setup where you didn't have to create each combination as a distinct SKU. I'm not saying it's 100% impossible, but I'd view it as extremely unlikely and probably a waste of time to pursue.
Why not just create your configurable products and their sub SKUs via CSV import? It will be far easier and faster than creating them one at a time. Creating every combination will also be extremely easy. If you're not comfortable with Excel, you need to correct that yesterday if you want to be good at product management.
See this article:
https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/magento/import-products.htm
In my magento application i want to create a module which is for adding FAQ for a individual product. So while adding the FAQ, in the new tab i want to show the list of all products(like product listing) for which product we want to add FAQ.
So please help me how to customize for getting list of products and display in the new tab?
The question is too broad friend. So don't hope any full solution here. That is because, this question is related to an external extension. But you will get guidance here. Here you may need to do following things.
I think in admin, the extension provides provision to manage each individual faque. What you need to do is, you need to create an extra field that will relate that faq with a product or multiple products.
If you set up this, you need to store this information in database. So for each faq, there may be a product id or multiple product ids related to it
Now you need to create a new block for your extension. This block will filter faqs that related to a particular product.
Next step is add above block in layout. Layout handle you need to use here is catalog_product_view.
Create a new template for your custom block and in that template file, you need to put design codes. You can create this template with the help of current template that this extension uses. That way, you can reduce a lot of time for creating the design.
Hope that helps !
really could do with your expert advice / knowledge & help...
We have a client who we built a magento site for. He sells parts for motorbikes, jet-skis, motocross etc..
We set up three attributes "Manufacturer" then "Model" then "Year" - and this was the selection process inside each product to drill down a price (as price changes on the models year) to achieve the pricing structure he wanted we used a simpler config products plugin that worked a charm. (which I found searching through these forums)
Problem.. The "Model" attribute is getting way too big (crashing the browser and timing out - and approaching what I have been told is the limit for attributes) so we have to rethink the logic (as last resort is to change the whole site and add them all as simple products and use filters instead - which the client does not want)
After days fo stress and researching we are still none the wiser...
one idea would be to split the model attribute into manufacturer.. so "Hond_Model" .. "Aprilla_Model" and so on.. but then we cant keep the structure of one product with all the options inside, be great of we could have inside the product (front end)
select honda model
select aprilla model
select Can Am Model
Year
but the user can choose one model from any three of the "model" drop downs, then it blanks out the other 2 model attributes and lets the user select the year to get a price.
But in the back end when I try this all three "Model" attributes have a red asterix and require an input in all three..
HELP!
Sorry if some of this is basic I am a designer who is learning magento with the help of my developer for the past 6 months so still new to this but already way out of my depth.
Any help would be so appreciated.
Given the level of complexity, the relative newness of your company with Magento, and particulars of the automotive fitment domain, it might be wise to buy an existing fitment module (e.g. Year Make Model Extension - not an endorsement - i have no firsthand knowledge of this extension) to bootstrap your development or to learn from. You should check with module vendor first to make sure that the code is suitable for this purpose (not obfuscated / encrypted, written using Magento conventions).
There are several approaches which can be taken depending on how frontend presentation and backend reporting should work, but these are too broad to be discussed here.
I have an e-commerce website where it is necessary to make a number of associations e.g. a product needs a category, manufacturer, associated products, etc.
When there is only a fairly small, limited amount of data e.g. Manufacturer I simple use a drop down or option boxes for the user to pick the relevent field / fields.
However for items such as associated products, where I have thousands or products it is not viable to use one of these methods. At the moment I use a searchable / paged table that the user then clicks a button to add the association, this works, but it is pretty time consuming for the user and not what I would consider an ideal solution to the problem.
Has anyone implemented a solution to this problem or could they offer any advice as to how they would come at this from a UI standpoint?
Thanks for any help you can be
The solutions I can think of are:
Auto-complete
Recent associations
Smart associations
There may be more depending on exactly what you're doing, so feel free to add more details or screenshots and I'll think on it more.
Auto-complete
Using an auto-complete field would speed up the process for your users since they wouldn't have to hunt through the table for the association. Rather they could just start typing and have a suggest box appear below the field that allowed them to select what they're looking for.
If you matched your auto-complete on several key fields (i.e. manufacturer and product name), there's a pretty good chance that the user would be able to find the association quickly.
You could also code the suggestion box in such a way that it showed multiple pieces of key data. That way if the user wasn't quite sure what they were looking for, typing a few characters in the field would give them an idea of what they could search with.
Recent Associations
Below your auto-complete field, you could add the 5 to 10 most recent associations that had been made. That would allow your users to quickly add many products to the same association without having to use the auto-complete each time.
Smart Associations
Separate from the above two mechanisms, a smart association is something I first saw when theming a Shopify store. They allow you to automatically create associations based on the products key fields by defining conditions to include or exclude products:
Create Association 'Pants'
Where product title contains string 'pants' or
Where product title contains string 'capri'
The above is controlled by a set of dropdowns and textfields and got around the pain of manually creating associations.
I have a customer who retails third party batteries, and some batteries can replace several OEM models.
For instance, 3rd party SKU 12345 may replace Toshiba N23 and HP 53214, thus my customer would like to create two products with the same SKU in front end (they are essentially the same product). However, Magento by default does not allow duplicated SKU.
My current solution is to set SKU to not required from the backend, and add another attribute called Model that allows duplicated values, and display the Model in front end.
Is there a better way to do this? Or is it possible to allow duplicated SKU?
Tian Bo
Noble Technologies
It sounds to me like you've found a good solution. I'm not so sure you should try to have duplicate values for SKU for two reasons.
First the whole point of SKU is that it is a unique identifier. That's its only reason for existing. If you're going to have duplicate values, then it's not a unique identifier; it's just another attribute. But of course Magento still needs a unique identifier to work, which means that this is an extra field, which takes us exactly where you are now.
That said we come to my second point which is this... I'm not exactly a Magento guru, but I've built my share of e-commerce sites and one thing I've learned is that they depend on certain unbreakable rules to work properly. One of them is that unique identifiers are unique, both on the database and application level. As such, a large part of the website depends on this to function correctly. Which I'm pretty sure goes for Magento too.
So trying to change such a basic premise in something so complicated will only lead to horrors and a slow descent into madness.
This sounds like a good solution that I extended a bit further, however what I did with multiple store was to create a visible attribute ITEM_SKU (Item SKU) - make it visible and searchable and then concatenate the store_id to Magneto SKU to make it unique.
So SKU becomes (Store_id "-" SKU).
It surprises me how often people are willing to break who-knows-what parts of Magento, just to get a specific piece working how they expect.
The proper way to allow for duplicate skus is NOT to (unless you'd like to re-write large parts of the framework). You CAN, however, add a custom attribute to products that shares all the same settings as "sku" minus the setting that requires values to be unique.
Changing product pages, emails, etc to show this value instead will require a little extra work but will save you headaches later.
Why don't you create 1 product (SKU 12345) and list this product in multiple categories. So your multiple categories will be Toshiba and HP. The same product (SKU 12345) will be listed in Toshiba and HP.