Unique attributes per product

I need to add unique attributes per product, because I need the attribute name to include the product ID for that version of the product. Eg: If I have black and white versions of product XX they have different product IDs, so I need to add XX-Black and XX-White as attributes, and they'll only ever be used for product XX.

What is the easiest way to do this? The standard attribute handler makes this hard work. I've looked at other attribute modules (but not installed them) but they don't seem to address this problem.

Any suggestions?

Maybe if you could give us a reason that they have to be so unique or more real world examples of how they are so unique it would help us figure this out ... :smile:

Good idea - maybe there's a better way to do this.

Lets say I have a widget in black or blue, product codes WIDGET-BLACK and WIDGET-BLUE. I also have a thingy product in black and blue (THINGY-BK and THINGY-BL).

I need to esnure that (a) these product codes are shown with the options as the user selects them (eg the product codes are in the attribute dropdown along with their description), and (b) that these product codes get passed through to the checkout and get sent to the shop owner with the order (the customer doesn;t buy a blue "widget", the buy a "widget-blue").

At the moment we do this by creating attributes WIDGET-BLACK, WIDGET-BLUE, THINGY-BK and THINGY-BL. We then have product WIDGET with attributes WIDGET-BLACK and WIDGET-BLUE, and product THINGY with attributes THINGY-BK and THINGY-BL.

This all works fine but it is a massive headache adding a new product with (typically) a dozen attributes (usually a range of colour and size options).

Its just occured to me also that I have no idea whether a search for "THINGY-BL" will find the right product, but I suspect that it won't..

So, is there a better way to do this, or a simpler way to do what I'm already doing?

You have a products_id options_id options_values_id

The combo is unique in the end ...

So a Widget Color Black and a Thingy Color Black would be unique to one another ...

When the Product gets processes it will already have the options_id and options_values_id built to a unique attributes_id that belongs to the products_id

I think you are trying to carry the unique to far ... and should be able to determin Color Black as unique from Color Blue regardless of whether this is a Widget or a Thingy ...

I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting.

Are you saying that given the unique combination of IDs I should create a new table of part codes against those unique combinations, then extract the data from that at the appropriate points (when generating the attributes list, when generating checkout pages and order emails, etc)?