For my site, I wanted to be able to add products to the store, then have a copywriter add the product display nodes. Unfortunately there is no built in way to provide a list of commerce products ready to be referenced. This represents a hole in the workflow for adding products which can be addressed by a simple view.
Goals:
Provide a list of products that were not yet referenced by any product display node.
Provide a link to quickly add a product display referencing the product.
To accomplish this you will need:
Views 3.x
prepopulate module (7.x in dev) - enabled
Steps:
Start by creating a new view. For "show" select "Commerce Product" and "type" your product type. Provide a page with the URL of your choice and display format set to "table" and leave everything else as default.
Add the fields you would like to show. At the very least you should have "Commerce Product: Rendered ..." to show the title with a link to the product and the Product ID field (which will be used later - you can hide it from display if you want, but it will need to be in your view).
Add a relationship for "Commerce Product: Node referencing products from [your_prudct_ref_field]."
Similar Entries 1.x provides a simple alternative to the Views-integrated version 2.x. It performs FULLTEXT searches on content title and body fields and can optionally include taxonomy terms in queries.
With its second version, Similar Entries is now fully integrated with Views 3. Site-builders can now manipulate Similar Entries queries through the Views interface to generate custom lists of related content.
How it Works
FULLTEXT queries
Similar Entries uses MySQL's FULLTEXT search capabilities to compare the content being viewed to other content on the site. The search is run against each available field in the database - title, body, or other fields. This query can be customized through the Views interface to include or exclude certain fields or to adjust the weight that each field's score should have towards determining its relevancy.
Updating with Cron
In order to monitor the status of various content fields, Similar Entries 2 updates internal field data each time cron runs. For this reason it is important that your site properly runs cron periodically. During cron, Similar Entries retrieves information about all the fields defined on the site and indexes each field. When new fields are added to a content type, running cron will ensure that Similar Entries indexes those fields and makes them available for use in MATCH queries.
A common way to use Views is building lists of entities of a certain type (products, projects, blog articles etc.), where each entity is stored in a node and represented by its title. By means of the default Views handler "Link this field to its node", the node titles can be linked easily to their corresponding nodes. But unfortunately the said handler cannot be applied in a selective way - once it is chosen, all titles will be linked without exception. What if you want a complete list of entities with only a restricted scope of links?
Consider the following use case. Suppose you employ Views to build a summary of all your projects. They are filtered by node type and represented by node title as the only field in use. Now you want some, but not all entries to be linked to their nodes - just because some projects are important enough to be showcased, others not. In our scenario, all node titles have to be rendered as "plain text" initially, and in a second step only certain selected titles are to be wrapped in a link.