Porduct characteristics fail to appear

hi,
I am dealing with products which are highly customizable. therefore I have 4 characteristics with 20, 12, 12 and 3 options.
each product will have a subset of characteristics and I will manage that as variants.
however, when creating the huge matrix of combinations the system gets stuck. tofday I managed to see all combinations only once, then it was too slow. I tried to do it again and now it does not want to show the options of characteristics 2,3 and 4.

it looks like a bug to me, what can I do to fix it?
thanks
CC

other times try t omanage variants I get a time out

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/sports63/public_html/administrator/components/com_hikashop/classes/product.php on line 415

It's not a bug. It's just that it's not possible to have so many variants per products as the system needs to load them all on the same page. The design of that feature is not made for handling that. Above a few hundred of variants, normal servers cannot handle the load.

In your case you should rather use options (at least for some of your characteristics): www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/i...ct-form.html#options

thanks, this makes sense,
how many otions in total can the system handle?
thanks
CC

Unlike characteristics, options do not combine together.
That has the drawback of not being able to refresh the product information on the fly based on the selection of options (only the price is recalculated).
For example, with characteristics, you could set a different image for each variant and have the image refresh automatically on the product page based on the choice of the user.
But it has the advantage of being able to handle much more possibilities if you use options. The same limitation apply: above a few hundreds of possibilities normal servers won't be able to handle. The difference is that instead of having 20*20*12*3 possibilities, you will have 20+20+12+3 possibilities if you only use options. So you have quite some space to add more options where with characteristics you're already way over the limitation of your server

thaks for helping!

CC

hey Nicolas,
trying to work on this now. I dont seem to find the Options menu. can you please tell me where it is on the product page?

thanks
CC

Options are only a feature available since 1.5.0 and in our commercial versions. You will find the "options" zone between the prices and the characteristics zone, when editing/creating your products.