Product categories

[de-raaf-media]

Hi,

I am trying out simple commerce on my development environment. I have a question. In GitHub issues I see product categories are mentioned. But I do not see an option to add a category to a product via the CP. What is the correct way to an add a product to a category? Or is this not part of simple-commerce and should I change the blueprint for instance?

Regards,
Mark

[duncanmcclean]

Hello!

Product Categories only existed very early on in Simple Commerce's existence, they've since been removed.

As products are just normal entries, you can create a taxonomy for product categories then link them up that way.

[de-raaf-media]

Allright. Good to know. I will look into it. Thanks!

[de-raaf-media]

Hi @duncanmcclean, I am trying to filter products by product_variants options. In eloquent I know how to achieve this (maybe I will convert my collection to database tables). But I cannot seem to find the right way of doing this with the Statamic entry. Can you point me in the right direction maybe?

$entries = Entry::query()
->where('collection', 'products')
->get();

[duncanmcclean]

At the moment, you can do something like this...

$entries = Entry::query()
    ->where('collection', 'products')
    ->where('product_variants->options->0->key', 'Blue_Small')
    ->orWhere('product_variants->options->1->key', 'Blue_Small')
    ->get()

In this example, it's queuing products where the first or second variant option is Blue_Small.

Right now, there's no way to do wildcards with nested fields like that, so you'll have to do a separate ->orWhere line for third/fourth/fifth/etc options on a product. Wildcards may be coming (it's a core Statamic thing), see statamic/cms#7454 and statamic/cms#8476.

[de-raaf-media]

Hm ... you would have to know the number of variant options in that case. Wildcards would improve this a lot.

I think for now I will go for the approach of migrating to a database and perform the query for the product filtering there.

Thanks Duncan

[duncanmcclean]

I think for now I will go for the approach of migrating to a database and perform the query for the product filtering there.

Are you planning on moving products to your own Eloquent models or using Statamic's Eloquent Driver?

If you go down the route of using your own Eloquent model, you'll need to implement your own ProductRepository to handle finding/updating products in the database, rather than with entries. Simple Commerce doesn't include products as part of it's "database" setup due to the increased maintenance overhead.

[de-raaf-media]

Actually - I may have been going in the wrong direction. Statamic is still a bit new to me. You mentioned taxonomies before. By using taxonomies - and combining them - I now implemented a collection filter with a couple of categories. So instead of filtering on Product Variants I am going to filter on one or more taxonomies.

taxonomy:categories="{get:categories}"

I combined your sort mechanism with product categories and I think this is turning out to be quite a flexible solution that I can keep extending with different taxonomies.

To answer your question: It was my intention to use the Statamic Eloquent Driver. And then use a separate model for querying and returning json to some kind of javascript filter implementation. But I am not going for that solution at this time.

Thanks for you help and input. Very helpful.

[duncanmcclean]

No worries - glad you've got it sorted!