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Make variants of members in a product family

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Roald Haahr
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Posted on 03/10/2024 11:07:37

We have a project where the customer wishes to import variants from BC to products that have been combined in a family in DW. I need to figure out the best way to do this, as it seems that it can't be done using solely standard functionality.

Solutions considered

  1. Uncombine families into flat products and create product groups to group the before combined products. That presents a series of new problems
    1. It will no longer be possible to show the family master products side by side with flat products without flooding the product lists and decreasing the overview of the available product types.
    2. Could be solved by creating a placeholder product that will link to the product group to replace the late family master product, but then it will no longer be possible to filter the product list based on the late family members' properties.
  2. Create a field on the products to hold information about a products variants, so family members can also hold information about their variants
    1. When calculating the price for a variant of a family member, the actual product ID + variant ID has to be written to the order XML before sending it to BC which will make it hard to present it afterwards as the variants does not actually exist in Dynamicweb.

But none of the solutions really seems good to me. Any help would be appreciated.

Kind regards
Roald

 


Replies

 
Nicolai Pedersen Dynamicweb Employee
Nicolai Pedersen
Posted on 07/10/2024 14:04:17
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Hi Roald

It is either variants or a family. It sounds like adding all family members to a group and use those groups as a filter is the best bet.

As I understand, you want this:

  • Family master of all
    • Family master 1
      • Variant 1
      • Variant 2
    • Family master 2
      • Variant 1
      • Variant 2

And in the product list you want to list only

  • Family master of all

And all attributes that are facettted from all family and variants under that would result in the same search result - list only "Family master of all" no matter what facet you add to a filter?

 
Roald Haahr
Posted on 08/10/2024 11:36:50
Reply

Hi Nicolai,

That is right and I would like to be able to solve the problem like that. However, I have a hard seeing how that is possible.

I am now contemplating a customized solution, where I create a placeholder product for a family member, which will then be associated with the variants of the family member. In the presentation of the family member, the variants of the placeholder is retrieved and shown in e.g. a dropdown. The visitor will have to select a variant before being able to 'add to cart'. The product added to cart will have the wrong product ID, but that will be handled by the live integration by using product number rather than product ID. I might have to create subscribers using OnBeforeGenerateProductInfoXml and OnAfterGenerateProductInfoXml to ensure that the product ID on the order lines will still look correct after cart/order calculations in the ERP system.

The structure will then be

  • Family master A
    • Family member A
    • Family member B

 

  • Family member B placeholder product (hidden)
    • Variant A
    • Variant B

 

This way I am keeping the benefits of being able to only show the family master products in the product lists while being able to filter on all the underlying members' properties. Please let me know if you can see any pitfalls in this solution or if you have another perfect solution in mind :)

Kind regards
Roald

 

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