Add product variations to product display with rules

Question

Using RULES, can anyone point me in the right direction to add lots of product variations to existing product displays?

Everything I've researched seems to be centered around creating the display when the variation is created or vice versa.

In a nutshell, my customer has created the product displays and I've setup VBO to create all the product variations. However I can't find a way to add all my particular variations to a particular display unless I either use the "Product Display Manager" module (which doesn't appear to support Bulk Operations), or add the variations one by one via the "Inline Entity Form". We'll be talking about 1000's of variations in the end.

I am a novice at RULES but it's cool to use, so ideally I would like to be able to create a RULE called, "Add variations to display". which would be available on the this page:

admin/commerce/products/variations

where I can:

1/ Select the variation checkboxes 2/ Choose the rule 3/ Click APPLY 4/ Have the rule ask me which product display the selected variations should be applied to (Ideally a list of display TITLES) 5/ Then save that product display once complete (I should be able to do that bit in the rule from what I have read)

Love to hear if someone has been able to do this or at least point me to where I can follow instructions specific to my issue. But I have a sneaky suspicion that it can't be done like this, otherwise I would have found a solution already.

Cheers

Answer 1

Even though I've quite a bit of experience with the Rules module, I don't know (yet) of how to do exactly as you described in your question (also because your question does not exactly include the details about which Event(s), which Condition(s) and which Actions you are looking for (try to be more specific on that (by editing your question accordingly).

I might enhance my answer (soon), but while waiting you may want to look/investige if either of the approaches below can be of any help ...

Commerce Bulk Product Creation

Consider using the Commerce Bulk Product Creation module. Excerpt from its project page:

... facilitates the creation of groups of related products in bulk. Product administrators can select a number of options for various fields, and a product will be created for all possible combinations of these values. Out of the box, only list fields are supported for this, but an API exists to enable other types of fields for 'combination creation'.

Attention: this module doesn't have an official release yet (only an RC6), though with over 1.600 reported installs, it seems it is pretty stable / trustworthy.

Commerce Backoffice

Another option to consider is using the Commerce Backoffice module, e.g. because of the auto creation of product display nodes. It provides the backoffice functionality present in Commerce Kickstart (V2), and contains these sub-modules:

• Commerce Backoffice Product (commerce_backoffice_product).
• Commerce Backoffice Order (commerce_backoffice_order).
• Commerce Backoffice Content (commerce_backoffice_content).

This module (and a few dependencies) provides the rich store owner experience that has made Commerce Kickstart 2 so popular (and prevents that you have to install the entire Commerce Kickstart distribution). And there is a great video introduction about it also.

Note: if you use Commerce Backoffice, you most probably also want to use the Shiny administration theme, also used in Commerce Kickstart (V2).

Answer 2

Thanks Pierre.

I'm already using BPC and have installed Backoffice. All that works fine. I just can't understand why it's so hard to add many product variations to existing product displays using a Rule?

Maybe this will help make it a bit clearer ...

Imagine you had 3 product displays (I've actually got 60+ with this project already created):

• Tall Boots
• Short Boots
• Kids Boots

and each product display is going to have 20 variations comprising of different colours and sizes. So that's 60 product variations that I need to get into the "Product Reference" field of each display. BPC works great creating all the variations, so no worries there.

Backoffice gives us a page at:

/admin/commerce/products/variations

which nicely lists all the variations and I can filter it accordingly.

With BPC installed, I get the option to select the variations I want and then run a "Rule/Component" on those variations. Such as the default "Delete product" rule to bulk delete variations.

So as per my post, I need to somehow get a rule working to do what I need, if in fact BPC & Product Reference field will allow this to happen. Maybe there is some mystery to all this, that's why no one has come up with a solution.

Does that help explain it better Pierre?

Cheers