Googlebase and Multi Variants

Hi, I use VM 3.x Multi Variants for size & color.
In this way I can control inventory for all alternatives and set gtins and other parameters that are specific for each child.

Is there a way to extract size and color values in order to pass them in the XML feed or, put it in another way, to parse the value of the MV field to extract the values you need?

You may see how MV is used in my site at www.puffosport.it .

Thanks,
Bruno

Hello, this should be possible using the options on the 'Product Variant Options' tab.

Set all these options to 'yes'

Show Product Attributes
Show Child Products
Show Product Variants

Then lower down the page for 'Size: Use Custom Field', 'Color: Use Custom Field' select the custom field that is used to represent the value

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Depending on your setup, you might find that instead of setting 'Show Product Variants' to yes, you can set this to 'Depending on custom field' then for the 'Variant Custom Field' option immediately below select the multi-variant field that you are using.

Hi,
I'm afraid your solution does not work as you said.

In fact it would be OK if you used a 'normal' custom field.
In the case of Multi Variant there is no possibility to specify which ramification to use for color or size.

You can still do this, you just need to set up string custom fields for 'color' and 'size' and attach them to the child variants as appropriate, then use these. If you look at the Virtuemart sample data, you will that they do this.

We will take a look at the multi-variant field, and see if there is a way of supporting it by taking the values used by the field, rather than requiring you to add these yourself.

However I am fairly sure that there will not be. The problem is that Google have a set of standard attributes, such as size, colour, age group etc. These do not correspond to Virtuemart product fields, so the only way of supporting them with the multi-variant field would be to use a custom label and create the set of values available, but you can only have one custom label field for a multi-variant, I tried with the sample data, if you try to add more it crashes Virtuemart so I don't advise it.

So you could only ever have one attribute that varies. For example if your products only ever have 'color' variants that would be fine, you can use the custom label for this, but it would not be possible to have products that vary by size and colour.

So the way that you support multiple attributes is this:

• create string fields called 'size', 'colour', 'age group' etc


• attach these as appropriate to the child variants, with the appropriate value


• in the feed options, for 'Size: Use Custom Field', 'Color: Use Custom Field' etc select the custom field that is used to represent the value

That is it, it will be a bit of work if you have a lot of attributes, but it will reliably work

Yes, I perfectly understand.
One possibility is to extract the values applying kind of regex on the multivariant string, but it is too complicated to make it a standard feature.

Thanks anyway,
In any case yours is a very useful and robust tool. I will reccomend it 100%!

Bruno