I have had a closer look now into the way attributes have to be defined and assigned.
And, if I understand that correctly, I must say: this is very, very, very awkward and cumbersome.
Instead of having to [B]type in the value of each product-attribute individually[/B] (which imo is very error prone) there should be a mechanism in place like the one for selection lists…
I.e.: you define [B]all attributes available for one attribute-class[/B] on a shop-wide base, and then add one of these attributes from a dropdown-box to a product.
This would save much unnecessary typing and it would be consistent…
What is even worse is, that these attribute values are now literally stored in the “oxobject2attribute” table for each product.
So if you e.g. want to change the name of one attribute option, you have to go thru alle products with this value and change it for each an any!
If there were shop-wide attribute-lists, you could store the internal attribute option id instead of it’s value, and only change the description once in the list.
In addition to seconding Avengers comments, I’d also like to add that the entire process of assigning attributes and entering values is very cumbersome.
Regarding assignment, it should be possible to select a value when making new assignments or edit a value for all existing assignments to avoid having to edit each individual product afterwards. This could save enormous amounts of time and, as it stands now, for shops with 100+ products it seems that adding a couple new attributes to all products would just be impractical for all but those fluent in SQL.
Regarding the edit of values, it should be possible to view and edit all attributes for a single product at the same time, rather than clicking each attribute individually. That is, the display and edit of attributes should be more like a table, showing all attributes assigned to the product with editable fields for each one, and a single save button for all changes.
With the specification/features tab now clearly visible in the Azure template, people are going to want to use attributes more often. But the current process will either deter or frustrate shop admins.
I agree!
First we show our employee how they fill/edit they attributes they said thats totaly impossible… so we build something thats like Avenger idea.
Its simply, we load all attributes in an array and put they in a drowdownbox. User click on 1 attribute, lets say color, so we load(distinct) all colors from oxobject2attributs like (red,white, blue…) and put it in another drowdown. So he can choose what he wants and we can save it.