Community @ The Turning Gate

SunFoxNC

Member

Registered: 2015-09-04

Posts: 80

Backlight Cart - Attributes Leaking From Product into Packages

I was playing round with the cart again today so I can start selling some photos I had taken at my daughter's dance recital.   Essentially I have two separate products:  prints of various sizes and packages made up of various combinations of DVDs containing web-quality renditions of the photos taken for a given recital show (we had three of them...it was that large!).

My goal was that the user could select their images in the gallery and add them to the cart in the usual fashion.  In addition, the "add package" button would be set to allow them to add DVDs to their order where each package would contain the individual DVDs corresponding to the shows they had selected (with three packages containing combinations of two shows and a big package with all of the shows).

Whilst playing about with this, I noticed that when I was trying to add products to the package...the attributes for the "Print" product stayed visible even after selecting the particular show DVD from the drop-list even though each of the DVD products were configured with no attributes at all.  These attributes carried throughout the cart in the summary screen as well as other locations where cart functionality is visible.

Also, whilst building up the screen shots...I clicked on a cart icon on a regular photo after having added the package with all three DVDs to the cart.  I was surprised that the resulting dialogue was wanting me to assign an image to one of the products in the package that was in the drop-list.  After thinking about it a bit, this shouldn't have come as a surprise and is what I'd expect to completely specify the images used for the package components so I wouldn't classify it as a bug per se.  However, it would be nice to specify that a given product and/or package does not require selecting an image for the component parts of the package.  I can work around this by instructing the users to select whatever image they want to be the placeholder or just handle the DVDs separate from Backlight's cart.

I also noticed that the product attributes offered for print size seemed to be in a random order and no amount of changing the name to fix the sort order would order the attributes as I wished.  However, I was able to delete all of the attributes...save...and then add the attributes back in the order that I wished and even though the Cart admin screens would still show them in a random order, the actual drop list on the live cart dialogue for a print would show them in the order I wished.  It might be nice to add an explicit order selection as there is in other parts of the cart. 

I've built a PDF of screenshots showing the progression and have EMAILed it under separate cover to Ben so he can see what I'm describing.

Ben

Moderator

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2012-09-29

Posts: 4,399

Re: Backlight Cart - Attributes Leaking From Product into Packages

Please provide a link to the gallery and any details needed to access the gallery and Backlight admin.

The behaviour of adding then populating packages is as designed.  A package is a container that holds items selectable from the album.

Attributes should appear in the order they've been added in the admin.  Is this not what you're seeing?

---

Ben

Email
https://somethingchanged.com

SunFoxNC

Member

Registered: 2015-09-04

Posts: 80

Re: Backlight Cart - Attributes Leaking From Product into Packages

Please provide a link to the gallery and any details needed to access the gallery and Backlight admin.

The behaviour of adding then populating packages is as designed.  A package is a container that holds items selectable from the album.

Attributes should appear in the order they've been added in the admin.  Is this not what you're seeing?

Credentials have been sent via EMAIL.

If you look at the "Print" product in the cart, the attributes for size are in the order I entered them (after I had deleted all of them and re-entered them in the desired order).  And they're in the desired order in the droplist when adding a photo to the cart which is the most important thing.

But if you edit a pricing scheme containing the "Print" product, the attributes for size appear in a different order than displayed in the product editor or in the cart on the live site.

(FWIW, I probably should have sussed out the cart's behaviour vis-a-vis packages straightaway.  I've got to say it's a right clever mechanism to populate the photos used for the various products of the package.  I think at the end of the day, I'll probably just create a Google form to capture the orders for the DVDs and use Backlight's cart for those products that are explicitly derived from a photo.  Even though what I was trying to accomplish doesn't look like it will be possible at this time, it was still a useful exercise playing round with the cart to see what I could make it do and in the process appreciate just that much more how clever the cart code is!).