Components

[marke]

I am setting up a site for someone who wants to seller printer cartridges. Clearly the products are the cartridges themselves. However one cartridge may go in many printers. I have read somewhere about setting up one product and then relating it to many others so that the "master product" is all that needs editing, the changes to this been reflected in all of the related products.

I found something in one of the help files or in one of the manuals but now I need to use it I can't for the life of me locate it again. It may be something at component rather than product level???

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks

Mark

[cdicken]

This is described in the Advanced User Guide on p10 - 'Inserting the Same Product Multiple Times'.

[marke]

Thanks I knew I had seen it somewhere. I now have another problem. I have created the master products (which are a load of printer cartridges) and now am trying to associate each as a component of different printers as per the instructions on page 10. The problem I ma having now is that when I tey to copy the master product and associate it with the original like the instructions say, I am finding that instead of pasting the product into the catalogue as an additional product which is related to the original master product, the product is in fact just been moved from the master products section to the product I have just copied to. Basically therefore the copy and paste seems to be working more like a cut and paste function. Once one component is set up the master has moved and therefore can not be used as a master to any other components.
Couple of other points. My master products are set up from a link to an external spreadsheet. When I copy and paste these master products I am not getting a prompt to enter a new product ref (presumably as theproducts are been moved rather than new ones created).

Hope you can give me some pointers on this one.

Thanks

Mark

[cdicken]

I have just set up external linking on my store and I highlighted one of my externally linked products and clicked [Ctrl + C]. I then highlighted a different section and clicked [Ctrl + V]. It prompted me to enter a new product reference. When I supplied a new product reference, it copied the new product in - but the new product was not externally linked (which is correct).

In other words, it seems to work fine so I could you maybe try it again following as closely as you can to what I have written above.

[marke]

Got this bit to work now but have found another problem. When i make changes to the data in the spreadsheet, these changes are reflected in the data in the master product. They are not however changed in the associated product. When I set up the associated product I checked the "Use associated product prices" and "use associated product names" boxes. I expected this to link the products so that any changes in the master would be changed in the component. Am I right in this assumption or do I have to change something else to make the associated products change with the master data.

Mark

[cdicken]

It is the component details that get updated rather than the product details.

You'll find that the component price is correct (when you add it to the cart) but you will need to manually update the price of the slave product to appear correctly in the HTML.

I know this is a pain, but in our defence v7 now has a proper 'Proper Duplicate' feature that does away with the need to use components in this manner.