magentoerpconnect-community team mailing list archive

[Guewen Baconnier <guewen.baconnier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello magentoerpconnect community,

I avail the momentum of reflection on the product's packs launched by
Raphaël to launch a discuss about the configurable products.

By configurable products (I use the Magento term, do you call it
varianted products in OpenERP ?), I mean for example the case of the
t-shirt which has 2 colors and 2 sizes with 5 products :
My T-Shirt (refers to the variants, I will call this one the
"container" product)
My T-Shirt Red L
My T-Shirt Red XL
My T-Shirt Blue L
My T-Shirt Blue XL
An example on Magento is available here :
http://demo.magentocommerce.com/zolof-the-rock-and-roll-destroyer-lol-cat-t-shirt-126.html
And it's configuration :
http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/index.php/admin/catalog_product/edit/id/126/

We searched for something already existing to manage them but did not
found anything. Do you confirm ?

We thought about several ways to manage them, here is a brief of our
considerations.

We excluded BoMs because that is not the same concept.

We considerate to use the product_variant_multi module. In the idea it
seems a good option. But in reality, the gap to integrate it with
magentoerpconnect is big :
 - Dimension and values corresponds to attributes and options, but the
datamodel isn't the same.
 - Generate variants based on a product.template but we will miss the
product which refers the variants (My T-Shirt).
 - The standard fields will be copied from the template on the
variants but we'll still need to go configure the magento attributes
on variants so it will be perturbing with some fields updated on each
variants and some not.
 - We are not sure of the bug-proof of the variants, it seems that
there were bugs in V5 with stock levels, but maybe it is fixed in V6.
Is anyone using this module and having problems ?
 - And it seems to me that there were some other reasons
I checked https://lists.launchpad.net/magentoerpconnect-community/msg00027.html
and contacted this guy but had no success, we doesn't consider his
solution.

And finally we proposed to manage them simply with a product.template
per variant as any normal product, but with a many2one link to the
"container" product.
The main disadvantage of this solution is that the user will have to
do updates on each product variant and create each of them manually.
But we can envisage a wizard to generate/update? them.
The main advantages is that it is far simple to integrate with
Magentoerpconnect and the products representation will be the same as
magento (5 products for 4 variants).
Indeed we can create views to display the "container products" or the
variants of the products.

We have a preference for the last solution, it is not perfect but simple.

Remains the problem of the creation of the configurable products on
Magento, because that's not possible in the API. We thougth that we
juste create an attribute on Magento like "configurable_variants"
which contains (on the "container" product) an array of SKU. Thereby a
module on magento have to interpret this attribute and link them on
the frontend.

What are your thoughts on that ?
Do you have any idea / hints on the way to go ?

Thanks

-- 
Guewen Baconnier

Business Developer
Business Solutions
Camptocamp SA
PSE A, CH-1015 Lausanne

http://openerp.camptocamp.com/

Phone: +41 21 619 10 39
Office: +41 21 619 10 10
Fax: +41 21 619 10 00
Email: guewen.baconnier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx