Adding Multiple Characteristics individually

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.2.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9
-- PHP version -- : 7.2

Hello,

I am trying to add multiple characteristics, let's say:

I am selling x product, and that product has different colors and sizes as well the user can choose if they want to get this product within one day.

So what I am trying to do is

Since I will have three variants in this case, and please note this is just an example:

1. Colors variant should be added individually (Because when I click on add variant it forces me to add sizes to the same variant as well, I dont want this to happen)
2. Sizes Variant should be added individually without forcing me to add the colors variants to each color and size, I do not want the calculation to be that way it gets very hard to calculate all the combinations of options because I have about 10 different variants
3. Within one day delivered variant should also be added individually I do not want to go and calculate every variant mixes with that variant.

In short what I am trying to achieve is if I have 3 different variants when I go to the variants tab, I should be able to add different variants individually not to mix them all together, and each option adds to the price that's it in short.

*I should be able to select which variant I want to add these options too like add colors, without being forced to add the other variants.

That's it thanks, please do let me know if you have any questions or if anything is not clear.

Please note I do not have time to keep customizing everything in the component, I know this is not your responsibility, so far you have a great component, however, I just want something that solves the issue really quickly, because I have already customized the component to display pictures as tiles with the variants instead of dropdown or radio buttons, so people can see which option to select as a picture. What I am trying to say I do not want to add these as products and then add them as options because there is noway to customize this as well, plus the "options" option is so limited, it is just you want to add this "yes or no" don't want this.

Thanks & Regards.

Look forward to hearing from you ASAP

I have about 9 different variants each variant comes with a list of options.

Let's name them as variant1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and variant 9

variant 1: comes with 10 different values
variant 2: comes with 10 different values

in that case I have to calculate all the combination of 100 because 10*10 = 100

While if I can add them individually without the combining option I will only have to do this for 20 options.

This really gets complicated with many variants.

I just gave an example of two different variants, how would it be when I have 9 different variants? Can you imagine? it is going to take 3 years just to add one product
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Edit:
I just did a small calculation on all the variants I am going to add, so I have to edit 93,750 prices to different variants doing all the calculation between all the possible combination while if I want to do it my way, it is going to be only about 45 variants. This is seriously not easy.

Please help.

Thanks

Nicolas,

Thank you for taking the time to read my situation and reply.

Ok great that options have all the functionalities, however doing that for every product, it is going to be a pain, because:

1. For every product, there will be other 9 products (options) assigned to this main product.
2. For every assigned product (options) there will be assigned characteristics to that product (option).
3. You have to edit the price of all these 9 options' characteristics for every main product you make.

In short, this means going to 9 different pages just to edit one price for one product, that's a lot of hassle.

I know it is very hard to edit the core, and it will be lost with updates, however, what I was thinking is just to guide me which file I can edit to have the ability to add characteristics individually, let me make it simpler:

Now when I am about to add values to characteristics it forces me to add the values of all the other characteristics with an alert message "Please select a value for each characteristic of your product"

I fixed the javascript so this alert message doesn't pop up anymore, however now the PHP part, will not INSERT any (data) INTO the corresponding table in the database, because you have made it not to insert any data if there is more than a characteristic selected for one product, what I simply need is to edit this part where it lets me add (values fo characteristics without forcing me to add values for other characteristics selected for a product) In case this works fine then that's it if it didn't work, then I guess I will have to switch to another component or unfortunately I will have to stick to customizing the view of the /administrator component and the /site component to be able to achieve what I want to achieve, if I only had time I wouldn't have complained about this at all, but unfortunately I don't really have time to do all these customizations.

Please suggest another solution other than the options if you could. Also like I said earlier, I customized the characteristics part to be displayed as images, and instead of radio buttons you can select an image, so by using options I will have to do another customization to make it look like I made it look for "characteristics"

But for the future, I guess you better group the characteristics, like make a characteristics category, and assign different characteristics to different categories, in that case, a user will not be forced to edit 100 different prices to 20 different values in characteristics, like my scenario above.

Just think about it, if I have 10 colors and 5 sizes I will have to fix 50 different prices for these options while if it was like I am saying you will only have to do that 15 times so it is 15 vs 50 and in my scenario, it is 93,750 different options VS 45 options.

Can you see how it gets complicated once you have more than 3 or 4 characteristics?

I really look forward to hearing from you about, if you just could guide me about which file I can edit to fix this restriction of being forced to add all the options every time I want to add a value for a characteristic.

Thanks

Hi Nicolas,

That was such a detailed informative post, thanks a lot for explaining everything, now I am confident enough I can do it, however, still on a very tight schedule, so if you can or would do it, please let me know how much would you charge for such a task? If not I guess I will do it myself.

Please note, I do not want you to do everything just making the process easy in the administrator part, I can take care of the view part on the frontend.

Thanks

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the prompt reply and for your offer, I really appreciate the time and effort you have put into this. I think that is much more than I expected, so I guess I will implement the solution myself, and I will let you know if I have any questions.

Cheers.

Hi Nicolas,

I have been working on this and have done some changes, so far it is going great but one thing which we didn't think of before, which is by default in Hikashop if I select more than an option for a product, and those two options are radio buttons you can only select one radio button among all these options, which is logical because as you know in HTML when it comes to radio buttons, they have to be grouped by name attribute and in Hikashop it seems all the options have the same name attribute in radio buttons, and the value of the name attribute should be changed to the characteristics name or hikashop_product_option[Product ID] or any other easy solution rather than "hikashop_product_option[]"

a real example of Hikashop options

<input type="radio" name="hikashop_product_option[]" id="hikashop_product_option_0192" value="192" checked="checked" class="inputbox" size="1" data-product-option="0" onchange="hikaProductOptions.change();">

Regardless of the option, the name attribute will always be "hikashop_product_option[] and for that reason, they are not grouped individually by the option you select, so in that case, you can only select one radio button among all the options assigned to one product.

For now, I used dropdown instead of radio buttons but I guess for the future this should be an important update, still there are a lot of things I am fixing because it doesn't simply work out of the box, luckily I am a developer and I can do some customizing, hacking and tweaking, however, as you know it is not good to hack the model and controllers file because you can not override them in Joomla, and you can only override the "view"

Plugins for sure are a great thing as they are events & triggers so you can trigger things and I know that very well, but there are some core files in the component that really need some update, it will easily start to get pretty complex if you want to scale the app you are developing.

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EDIT:
For sure checkboxes can be selected, but not if you can only select one option from each group of options, because as you know you can select as many checkboxes as you want regardless of if they are in the same group or in different groups but for radio inputs a user should be able to at least select one option from each group.

Regards