Well, I am not sure whether this is a bug or a feature. I am in the processof setting up an e-shop for a customer, who sells goods with lots of variations (e.g. prams in over 50 different colors, with 3 different undercarriages, etc.). For this reason I need subproduct functionality. The module built-into e-commerce (subproducts of apparel) is unusable. While searching this site I came accross e-Commerce Live Subproducts, which should be used instead, and which is to be the only supported solution for subproducts in e-Commerce 4.x. However, I find the module useless as well:

When I create variations of a product, the product catalog is flooded with all possible combinations. I tried to put them into a separate product category (which is not shown to a customer), but as soon as I put any of the into the shopping cart, it reappears. What is even worse, it lacks photo. The product catalog is thus gradually being filled with damaged product entries. It is not accaeptable.

I would like to know whether there is any usable solution for subproducts at all. My customer can't afford having >150 possible variations of the same product in the product catalog. This has turned out to be a serious problem, which is coming to me as a very unpleasant surprise.

Comments

Phillip Mc’s picture

Phillip Mc commented
Title: e-Commerce Live Subproducts flooding the product catalog » how to unpublish subproducts using ecommerce so they don't show up on the product page..

How was the apparel module "useless" for you? I've used it before for building an ecommerce site selling t-shirts with different sizes/ colours etc. and it worked great. It took a few minutes to understand how the variation and attributes system works, but, once you get over that hump it's very intuitive. ecommerce 4.x is still in development, by the way.

I'm not using the live subproducts module, but, as I understand it, the way subproducts work with ecommerce is it creates a node for every product variation automatically..but the live subproducts creates them during cron runs to reduce server load when generating a lot of products with a lot of variations.

I was working on an ecommerce site recently (using ec-3.x-dev) and I was able to select "hidden" for the subproduct nodes...i.e. the product nodes are marked as unpublished as they are automatically generated so they don't all end up showing in the www.example.com/node link or in the product catalogue.

If you are making checkpoint backups of your database, so you can go back a few steps, you should revert back a step - prior to generating your subproducts and go to the live subproducts settings page and double check to see if there's a HIDDEN or UNPUBLISH option for your subproducts there...if not, simply go to ADMINISTER -> CONTENT TYPES -> PRODUCT -> EDIT and specify UNPUBLISHED as the default setting for product nodes. After you have generated all your subproducts, you can simply edit the parent product and set it to PUBLISHED, so only "parent" products appear on the product page.

If you've already generated your products and subproducts and you're not making backups of your drupal database, you can simply go to ADMINISTER -> CONTENT and filter your nodes by PRODUCT type and unpublish all your subproducts in bulk.

I've changed the title of this thread to be more descriptive.

Robert_SK’s picture

Robert_SK commented

Thank you for the prompt answer.

I do not use the standard subproducts of apparel module in e-commerce, because the shopping cart is just broken.Searching this web I found ouy that the module was outdated and I was supposed to use ec_live_subproducts instead, which is the only subproducts solution to be supported in e-Commerce 4.x.

You had very good suggestions, but:

For each combination of attributes a new product is generated. This is not done by cron, but it takes place when the product is put into the shopping cart . However, this is not important.

The main problem is, that the newly generated subproduct inherits exactly the same flags as the main product. So, if the main product is published, the subproducts will be pusblished as well. I tried to change the default settings for the product, but it did not help. The subproducts are not created, they are *copied*. That's the problem. The also get the same category and any other settings. I just do not see any way of getting rid of the subproducts in the view the customer sees.

I have been unable to locate any configuration of the ec_live_subproducts module yet.

Unpublishing all the subproducts byhand is of no use. If I change anything in the main product, they all get deleted and created again next time a customer puts them into the shopping cart.

Robert_SK’s picture

Robert_SK commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Finally I found a solution at http://drupal.org/?q=node/161434
I only found it thanks to you changing the title of this thread. I tried to enter "ec_live_subproducts unpublish" into Google, which gave me just four hits one of them being the abovementioned page. It says that 3.4 is no longer updated and all efforts go into 4.x. Which is still in alpha. :(

I have yet another (minor) problem with ec_live_subproducts, which I will discuss in another thread.

Thank you much for your prompt help.
Case closed.