Quote Originally Posted by badarac View Post
I applied the change to line 252. It allows me to add the product to the cart and as long as I add an entry in the SBA table for the text attribute with a quantity it will allow checkout. Without the text attribute added and a quantity assigned it marks it as out of stock. Not sure if that's what you intended.

I wasn't sure if the remaining comments were about changes to support 1.5.5 or if you meant for me to pick up additional changes for disabling the dynamic dropdowns. If you want me to do more let me know.
So, to support having SBA installed and to track stock only when/where needed instead of earlier versions in some way or another requiring all product with attributes to be tracked by SBA, I've updated the template files to disable dynamic dropdowns when the attribute list of a product contains an attribute that is not yet managed by DD. That is/was the stuff about some of the other posting.

As to the text attribute and it's need in the SBA variants. While not a great solution perhaps, but the checks performed when adding to the cart verfy that the attributes present are supported by the definition(s) for the product... ZC doesn't provide such a check per se where one could use web tools such as firebug for firefox to modify the attributes that will be posted and submit the product to the cart and basically it will go through if properly modified. But, the store owner would see this as an error and either dump the order or ask the customer about it.

With SBA or the concept behind it, one "complexity" is that when mixing attributes, one sub-attrbute may not exist for the product by "design" or vendor availability. So it is important to validate that the customer chosen options exist as defined by the store owner. The DD part mostly takes care of that (though such a non-existent option actually shows as out-of-stock instead of being hidden from display), but need/want to be sure to provide functionality when javascript is also *not* available or when the store owner chooses not to use DD for anything.

So... To meet that end, a text attribute should be associated with the product (whether required to filled in or not). If it is a non-stock beaing attribute, it should be combined with other variants... If say it is stock bearing, like only have so many badges that can be printed with information, then the text attribute should be individual, but as it stands, if the text attribute is split out so should all the other attributes for that product...

As development continues and such idiosynchrocies identified more controls are likely to be added to the admin side, but still trying to basically provide the largest application to the basic possibilities without limiting expansion.