Hi Ruth/Scott,
This post is related to a post I did some time ago. My client is a
vehicle breaker that scraps vehicles, and sells the individual
components. When they scrap a vehicle, they keep the main components
such as the engine and later sell those items individually. Some of the
engines may be serialized and some may not.
For example, they may have scrapped 10 "Porsche 911 3.2 Carrera series
(1984–1989)" cars and have the following engines:
Porsche 911 3.2 liter horizontally opposed flat 6 cylinder engine
- non-serialized, QOH = 8, price £1,500 each
- serialized, QOH 2 :
- serial #12345, description "excellent condition", price £2,000
- serial #23456, description "doesn't start", price £500
From the trials that I have done with ofbiz r4.0, the stock management
aspect works great. Using the following steps:
- create a product of type virtual (e.g. POR911-3.2-FL6)
- create non-serialized stock for POR911-3.2-FL6 and add 8 units
- create a product of type variant (e.g. POR911-3.2-FL6-12345)
- select POR911-3.2-FL6 product, in variants tab, enter POR911-3.2-FL6
and click "Add variant product"
- create a product of type variant (e.g. POR911-3.2-FL6-23456)
- select POR911-3.2-FL6 product, in variants tab, enter POR911-3.2-FL6
and click "Add variant product"
- create serialized stock for POR911-3.2-FL6-12345 and POR911-3.2-FL6-12345
- create serialized stock for POR911-3.2-FL6-12345 and POR911-3.2-FL6-23456
At the moment they don't need ecommerce, they just need stock
management, but when they do need ecommerce, then I guess I will have to
write some custom pages to allow their customers to be able to see the
description and prices of individual stock items and choose the item
that best suits their requirements. Features don't seem to make sense
for this application, and I'm not sure where virtual/variant products is
the right way to go either. Perhaps I should model the association
purely as a product association of "equivalent or substitute". However,
one benefit of using virtual/variant is that in the catalog inventory
screens, it shows a nice summary of stock for each variant.
However, when trying to add variants in various ofbiz versions, I get
the following result:
TRUNK: Error calling event:
org.ofbiz.webapp.event.EventHandlerException: Service invocation error
(null)
9.04: No selectable Features found . Please create some and try again.
4.0: All ok - no error
- create a product of type virtual (e.g. CS-VIRT1)
- create a product of type variant (e.g. CS-VAR1)
- select CS-VIRT1 product, in variants tab, enter CS-VAR1 and click "Add
variant product"
Any ideas?
Many thanks,
Chris
Ruth Hoffman wrote:
Hi Chris:
This is just my opinion, but yes you could do that, but be aware that
the ecommerce application makes some assumptions about virtual and
variant products. (For example, how to display HTML select boxes that
allow a site visitor to choose the variation of a virtual product.)
At a minimum, the ecommerce application may not know how to handle
your products in terms of catalog listings, shopping cart displays
etc. I haven't looked at the code lately so I'm not sure what the
total impact would be.
What are you trying to do?
Regards,
Ruth
Chris Snow wrote:
Can a variant product be linked to a virtual product without using
features?
Many thanks in advance,