Be able to limit Variant Editor to single variants

[MichaelNielsenDK]

The variant editor is great for quickly creating variants.

It would be nice to be able to choose if it should be able to create multi-variants or not.

That way, editors on shops that shouldn't have multi-variants, can't make them by mistake.

Perhaps a setting on the Variant Editor Data type?

[mattbrailsford]

Hmm, just trying to think this through. Even if we limit this to a single variant, could this still cause problems? ie, someone could make a variant with a product attribute that the product doesn't support, so it's still possible to mistakenly set this product up.

I was thinking a while ago whether the editor should have a prevalue option to select allowed product attribute values / presets to limit the selectable options which could be used to limit someone to a single option, but on the flip side, does this mean each product type is going to end up needing it's own doc type with uniquely configured prop editor which is not ideal?

I think there is potentially something that could be useful in here somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure what yet 🤔

[MichaelNielsenDK]

In another ecommerce system that we work with, you create "profiles", and create variants and options on those profiles, and when you create a product, a profile is selected, and if the profile has variants, these are then created.

I feel though that the variant editor in vendr is much more flexible and fast. And while I could possibly create pants products with t-shirt sizes as variants, I don't think that would be an issue.

The Single/Multi-variant option is more for technical reasons. Handling multi-variants in the code and views are more complex than single variants, i.e. getting the variant guid and adding to cart.

There are things that need to be in place for multi-variants to be supported, but if an editor sees that it's possible, they might expect that it is, resulting in a discussion on why it's not, and who should bear the financial burden of making it so. (Speaking from personal experiences 🤦‍♂️)

Or they might create an error in the front end, if there's something that isn't handled.

So from my point of view, an option to select single or multi-variants is one thing.

Limiting certain variants to certain products is a separate thing.

[mattbrailsford]

@MichaelNielsenDK that's a fair point 👍

Just to add to this, for single variants, you can still use the child nodes approach as still used in the rest of the demo store. You can even pass the child nodes key as the productVariantReference and the parent node as the productReference and this will work. Doing it this way will actually allow you to use the priceAdjustment pricing strategy using child nodes.

Your point is still valid and something we can look at, but just wanted to highlight that the child node variants is still an option for single variant setups and fully supports some of the new variant features.