X-Cart forums

[2ndTracks]

I sell skis and ski boots on my website, which tend to come in all shapes and sizes. So far I have used product specific attributes in order to make product variants, as I normally have size runs of a particular product.

My question is, can I get those product specific attributes to work with the product filter?

On other skis that I have only one size of, I have a global attribute to put the size. But when I use this same approach for items with multiple sizes, I can either select only one size, or enter multiple values for size and end up with two drop down menus in the product, one with the product specific sizes and another with the global sizes.

This is kind of a tricky issue to explain, but I can provide examples if need be.

[qualiteam]

Product Filter works with global and class-specific attributes only. Unfortunately, it won't work with product-specific attributes.

On other skis that I have only one size of, I have a global attribute to put the size. But when I use this same approach for items with multiple sizes, I can either select only one size, or enter multiple values for size and end up with two drop down menus in the product, one with the product specific sizes and another with the global sizes. This is kind of a tricky issue to explain, but I can provide examples if need be.

You don't have to fill both the global attribute, and the product specific attribute. But I think I may misunderstand you. An example would help

[2ndTracks]

Sure, this one is kinda confusing...

Maybe to put it more simply, why is it that product specific attributes don't show up in the product filter sidebar?

By extension, is this actually a function of the product filter module?

[qualiteam]

I believe it was implemented intentionally.

Let's say you have 100 products with 2 product-specific attributes each. As Product Filter doesn't know how to group these attributes together, it would have to show a block with 200 options (one for each attribute) - this is definitely something that no one can use ever. Even if you name all the attributes the same (for example, "color"), Product Filter would consider these as different attributes.

[2ndTracks]

Okay, that makes perfect sense to me. I didn't really think it was possible, and for a good reason, but I just wanted to check.

So that leads me to another question: I need to use product specific attributes because of my store's setup/variants. So is there a way for me to add a multi value global/class attribute without creating a drop down menu on the product page?

My issue is that if I have defined several product specific attributes for size to use as variants, and then add a few global attributes for the product filter, I end up with two, redundant and confusing dropdown menus in the product page.

I would like for customers to be able to filter by size, but not at the expense of easily discerning what size they want to buy when they find what they are looking for.

[qualiteam]

I think you will have to switch to class-specific/global attributes only, otherwise (even if you find a way to hide the second drop-down via a custom module) someday the product-specific and global attributes may go out of sync.

Class-specific attributes don't share the list of values among products of this class. So, for example, you may have a product having 3 color options, and other one having 5 colors. However, it will be a single attribute, so Product Filter should work properly.