Magento Can't mass update attributes for Required Field Error - magento

Question

I’m hoping someone can shed some light on this:
I’m using the search facility in Magento to find products with a certain attribute, and then selecting those products and using the “update attributes” feature to add data to (update) a different attribute field.
In some cases, this works fine, the new attribute data is recorded and all is well. On other selections when I try and save the new attribute data it comes up with the red warning “this is a required field”. Sure enough, the field it specifies IS a required field, but as I’m not updating that particular field I’ve not ticked the check box underneath it and this field should be ignored.
If I turn off the “required field” option for the highlighted fields then the new attribute data gets saved BUT: It wipes the data in loads of the other attributes, meaning I lose valuable data from my product attributes. It seems as if it works the first couple of times I use it in a day then it spits its dummy out and comes up with the required field issue.
I’ve tried this with both Google Chrome and Firefox. As I’ve said though, sometimes it will work , sometimes it won’t . I’m selecting 20-100 products at a time. I’ve even tried selecting just one product, and can still get the same error on that one product.
I’m on Magento 1.7.0.2
I did have a similar problem with attribute data getting wiped last year when we were on 1.6 but I seem to remember it was a Magento bug which was fixed when we upgraded to a newer version.
Can anyone shed any light on why this might be happening? There’s nothing coming up in the search engines for it and its really slowing me down!

Answer 1

The problem is that the attributes are NOT getting disabled by default in the update attributes page, hence require a value.
Why?
Most likely due to a faulty attribute failing somewhere above your attribute.
Option 1. As I don't know what attribute or the attribute problem, hack js/mage/adminhtml/product.js and change this function to ignore the faulty attribute.
function disableFieldEditMode(fieldContainer) {
try {
$(fieldContainer).disabled = true;
if ($(fieldContainer + '_hidden')) {
$(fieldContainer + '_hidden').disabled = true;
}
}
catch(exception) {
}
}
Option 2. Remove the faulty attribute from the product (You might need to remove restrictions ).
update eav_attribute set is_user_defined = 1 where attribute_code like 'foo_bar';
Option 3. Fix the faulty attribute. In my case the offending module was AW_Onsale.
it attempted to render a nonexistent frontend model: onsale/system_entity_form_element_position
select attribute_code, frontend_model from eav_attribute where attribute_code like '%aw_os_%';
aw_os_product_position | onsale/entity_attribute_frontend_position
update eav_attribute set frontend_model = null where attribute_code like '%aw_os_product_position%';
update eav_attribute set frontend_model = null where attribute_code like '%aw_os_category_position%';