Required Attributes

[Vladimir7]

I am selling books in a store.
For every product I make the book have a price for $0.
I then set up radio attributes for edition
example
Print Version $50
Web Version $40
PDA $40

etc
So that I do not need to make multiple listings for each product

I then always make Print version Default Attribute
to be Marked Selected

Which works out ok, so that print will always be checked.

However, I use firebug (where you can make updates to html pages on the fly to see how the layout changes) and I can then make it so Print Version is unchecked. Then click add to cart, and a price of 0 shows up. So clearly there is no validation because you can never trust the client machine.
Am i just doing something wrong? Or am I going to have to code my own validation script?

I mean 99.9% of people won't bother cheating the system like this, and if they did I would obviously not honor the order. But it just seems kind of lame that with a simple 'hack' I can put in an order for a free book because I changed a bit of HTML on the client

[DrByte]

If the customer "hacks" it out and therefore selects no attribute, there will be no correct book selection on the order. Thus you wouldn't know which one to ship, so you would catch their fraud right away.
And for your web version, if they don't check the box, they aren't charged, and they aren't given access to the download either.
So, there's really no way "around" it.

One way to enforce it could be to add a different option for "default" and make it display-only. Name it "please select a format". Then they're required to select an option. If you don't like the way that looks as radio buttons, you might try pulldown instead.