That is commonly suggested when this question has come up in the forums, and it seems like a natural thing for that plug in to do, but for whatever reason it seems not to.

Aside from that, I need to make this integration as non-intrusive as possible so that future customers who are also on Zen Cart will be able to use it as well. I can't necessarily ask that everybody installs a particular plug in.

I think what I'm going to have to do is add a table outside ZC and write a script that cycles through all the attributes of all the products periodically and populates that table with all the possible combinations. Then my script will look at each products_id and see if it appears in that table. If not, it will use products.products_model, but if so then it will use the appropriate model number from that external table. (Which also means building my own interface to manage the model numbers in that table.)

This all seems very kludgy. If anybody has a better solution, I'd sure love to hear it. :)