Force customer to pick a "backup" product when shopping.

I need to force a customer to add custom notes to a product before they add it to their cart. For each product I have in a certain category I need a place for the customer to pick an additional product (irregardless of price) from the same master category.

Here's how it would work: If a customer picks a product in a category, they need to pick 2 "backup" products from the same category, never duplicating selections. I pitcure 2 drop downs.

Example:
Category A has 10 products. (prod1, prod2, prod3, etc)

If the customer has selected prod2 from Category A, then the first drop down would have products 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 in it.

If the customer picks prod3 from the first drop down then products 1,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 would be available in the second drop down.

It would be nice to require either or both of the drop downs to be selected.

I would assume this additional data would not be specifically stored in the database. If they were stored/presented in the order history/notificaiton emails/etc as part of the notes section that would be just fine.

I originally started looking at product attributes and options. I couldn't completely figure that out yet though.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Paul

This could be quite complicated...

There are DEPENDANCIES here, and all are relative to the product in question, so your system will definitely need an admin-side feature that can do the assignation (configuring what product must be assimilated to what other product(s) and under what circumstances.

This will necessitate the addition of either a database TABLE, or additional FIELDS, where the relationships can be stored.

Then you will need an admin interface that allows you to ENTER the relevant data, and capture it to the database.

Then you will need a range of code that presents all this to the customer, and captures their selections.

Quite a lot of work...

You're right those dependencies do sound pretty colmplicated. What if I were to simplify the requirements. Instead of populating the drop downs based on previous selections etc, the drop down was populated by a standard sql query without much required logic.

Example:
Category A has 10 products. (prod1, prod2, prod3, etc)

When a customer is shopping in Category A, there is a drop down on each product providing a selection for ALL of the products in the same category (A). Because we want the customer to pick a "backup" product each time a selection from the dropdown is required.

Is this suggested drop down considered an attribute?

Thanks

Paul

Can i ask why you do not just have one product with each of the other items as attributes?
Or you could have all of the products still there but have each of them have attributes that relate to the other products in that category (i.e. each of the other products names could be made into attributes and added to the product?

Just a thought... Probably no use at all :P

Thanks JaminT,

That sounds like a relativly simple solution. I couldn't figure out how option & attributes worked, or if options were even necessary for attributes.

So you are saying that each product needs to be an attribute, then I will have the ability to add these additional products (attributes) to each other product? I'll take a look at that. Do I need to do anything with options? I assume I can force the selection of an attribute?

Thanks

Paul

No, each product would be a separate product in the category. Then each product would have a set of attributes (one dropdown or radiobutton option name like "Alternate Product", with option values added as attributes for each of the other product names. You would also need a dummy option value attribute like "Select one", marked Default and Display Only in Attributes Controller. This is what forces a selection to be made.