choices, components, attributes .. costs

[davidfarndon]

This continues to be a bit of a bug bear for me... I wonder if anyone has any really neat solutions?

I have a client's site (one of my first actinic sites in fact) which has various office furniture related products.

www.berkshireofficefurniture.com

some of these have various components, fabric types, additional shelves etc., which may or may not effect the final price.

an example of one of these is http://www.berkshireofficefurniture....t_storage.html

on this product, I have used components to allow additional shelves to add to the base cost .. but using the 'is optional' for each .. as clearly they are .. potentially allows a buyer to add several options (when they should only be able to choose one or the other) .. if I use attributes (which gives me choices 'this one' or 'that one' but not more than one capability) I can't create a price addition.

this is muddied even further when we get to a chair perhaps which has a choice of fabrics (which may or may not effect the cost) a choice of different bases (again, these may or may not effect the final cost), types of arms (ditto).

A user then can choose the fabric (or more than one .. God help us, if that is available .. and on one or two products is seems to be), whether or not to have the chrome base, the black base or the solid gold encrusted with diamonds base) three versions of bionic arms and if the bl**dy thing has a headrest or not .. gasp ..

as you can imagine these ends up with me tearing my hair out trying to achieve all the variants using what appears (for this particular site anyway) a very inflexible way of adding to a base product.

why can't a component, added to a base product have more varied selection options (like radio / drop down) which restrict user selection if that's desired and why can't an attribute (say a colour or fabric choice) be able to change the end cost? .. because they can!

if nothing else, can this flexibility be added to Actinic v8 wish list please? .. and if anyone has any neat solutions to my woes .. I am very happy to listen.

or (as usual) have I missed something blatently obvious and am using all the wrong methods of trying to achieve the objectives?

be gentle !!

David

[Mike Hughes]

Hmm. I'm not sure you're using components corrctly.

lets stick to one example, a chair, to try and keep it as simple as possible.

The Chair would be a base price, plus several optional components; fabric, armrests, headrest.

So you create a chair, then add components for fabric, armrests and headrest.

Now for each component add an attribute (you can use the same names) and then add the optional choices to each attribute. i.e. blue, red, etc for fabric, no armrests, black armrests, etc.

You can then set up pricing, etc for each component option under the permutations tab for each component.

Mike

[davidfarndon]

you see .. what I should be doing is simply sitting quietly rocking whilst mumbling to myself and dribbling ... and not getting involved with all this stuff.

the key to all this is PERMUTATIONS !!!

Thanks Mike you are a bl**dy genius .. this is the key clearly, apologies to everyone, everywhere for everything.

(I think that might just cover it)

David

[Mike Hughes]

Every time I go through components / attributes / choices / permutation I end up starting from scratch again. It certainly isn't intuitive.

PS. In case you haven't picked it up yet, the drop down / radio buttons / etc presentation of the choices is controlled at the attribute level for each component.

Mike