Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

[aarcmedia]

Has anyone been able to find a work around to the Attribute Machine/Select One bug in PR7? We reported this glitch to the MM around a week ago, and need to see if there are any fixes others have come up with, because MM likely won't fix it any time soon.

Here's what happens...

When using Inventory Variants and in turn, the attribute machine which updates pricing and inventory on the fly via the javascript MM created, you lose the ability to add a "Select One" to any drop down menus you employ.

By Select One, I mean instead of defaulting the drop down to the "default" attribute/inventory variant, you used to have the option to add "Select One" to the attribute template.

Now this doesn't work, and it has something to do with the javascript that powers the attribute machine.

Miva knows of the issue, but we need a quick fix, and something that is semi quick as opposed to having to completely re-vamp the way the products have been input into Miva.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

While this is just semantics, it's actually not a "bug" in that the Attribute Machine's job in the world is to not show combinations of attributes that don't exist. And since Select One is not a valid combination of Attributes, it hides them.

This feature is something we'll likely add in Update 8, but I would call that a medium term fix not short.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

Can you use radio buttons instead? that's what I'm contemplating doing. They actually look very nice.

The attribute machine does display them all in stock and out of stock by default. But it grays out the out of stocks and make the OOS unselectable. But you could add css to make them 'disappear'.

having the grayed out OOS is actually kinda nice if you do waitlist notifications.

[aarcmedia]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

Well what other way can you control inventory at the attribute level, without using the inventory variants? Any documentation would be great. Viking Coders system is more like what they need. Are there features that function similar to that module included in PR7?

[aarcmedia]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

To add to this, we're not looking to mix and match attributes. In this case, they only have 1 attribute, but needed to control both pricing and inventory by the 4 options within that single attribute.

Our aim was to just include the inventory level and price, right next to each option within the drop down box, but we couldn't find documentation on whether that's possible with PR7 and support told us it's not possible.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

re: Well what other way can you control inventory at the attribute level?

you wouldn't use wombat's inventory system, as it needs the variants to do that.

With Ricks clue... i've tried another approach.
First I modified the product template: product attribute template
so that the select now has an id on it. That means I can target it specifically using the Document Object Model and get to it with ajax dhtml kinda of code stuff.

Look at the "attribselect" in the following example.

I changed

<select name="Product_Attributes[&mvt:attribute:index;]:value">

to:

<select name="Product_Attributes[&mvt:attribute:index;]:value" id="attribselect">

then in the PROD screen footer I added this:

<script type="text/javascript">
var oSelect = document.getElementById('attribselect');
var oOption = document.createElement('OPTION');

// Add the option to the collection first, then set properties
oSelect.options.add(oOption,0);
oOption.innerHTML = "Select One";
oOption.value = "select";
oOption.disabled = true;
oOption.selected = true;

</script>

It's working in chrome, haven't tested anywhere else yet.

But it's a start on a way to use dhtml/ajax type stuff to manipulate forms on the website and force a select one message to appear without hurting the adding to cart and buy now functions.. plus it will by pass the attribute machine.

The issue with this, is after a customer makes a selection.. then the attribute machine will kick in again.. and the select we force to appear will "disappear"

why? becuase the page isn't being reloaded to run the script at the bottom again.

But to me.. this is not a big deal. obviously the customer got the message to choose something and they did.

fyi.. don't give me credit for this, I googled and found the answer spread about on about 10 different website, I just put it together.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

Our aim was to just include the inventory level and price, right next to each option within the drop down box...support told us it's not possible

Ted,
I"m curous about who the 'support' is that told you it isn't possible.
I've found that while miva (the company) will tell you that something is not possible. They always will also add a caveat such as "with stock miva merchant" or "with miva merchant out of the box" or "with Miva as it is at this time". That is my clue to go digging with a third party module such as toolkit or toolbelt.

Miva is being very truthful and they are also not going to provide support for third party add-ons. They can't. They shouldn't. They aren't paid to do that and they can't know everything about every third party or fancy coding that can happen in storemorph. It is just flat out silly to expect them too. There are just billions of permutations of all those things combine.

I've almost always found that there is a way around what miva merchant won't do natively by itself. If you've got toolbelt, you can access the database tables directly via sql queries and get the info you want and display it anywhere you want. so you could go into your database and pull the info you want, IF you can design the sql query that will give you the answer in an efficient way.

So, it's true, miva can't do it by itself. BUT it doesn't mean that it can't be done.

The successful developers that are active on this forum are masters a manipulating Miva in ways that Miva (the company) doesn't expect. And that is why they have jobs. That is the beauty of Miva, how manipulatable it is, while providing a strict framework that keeps it easy for non geeks to build a store.

You are wanting to do some very advanced stuff. You might want to seek help from someone like Leslie or James or Kent or Ray (wait don't call him... I need him for something right now) or anyone of the very active others who offer their services.

But I"m sure you can get to the inventory quantities if you've got toolbelt. And you can display them too.

[Datagg]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

We had Miva try to find a solution for this also within wombat and there is none. We did however have it when we had "Viking Attribute templates", yet we wanted to use wombat features and as such Viking attribute template had to be shut down.

After we shut that down we realized that products that had "optional" items became mandatory as there was no choose..... Obviously this was a big whoops on our end and Miva had no way to fix it.

After some scrambling, I just made the top attribute in an optional field as "None". An example of that at http://www.girlfriendslingerie.com/E...-costumes.html

This has been working for us for now, but I am waiting for the day they address this so we can do it the right way.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Attribute Machine & Select One Bug

Ah I see what you mean. If I choose that the attribute is not required by leaving the checkbox for required empty. It is always still required. That certainly is a bug.