/Rune

/Rune

Thanks again!
Ryan

With Tea Commerce you have a huge amount of freedom in how you can to do things. The variant model I explain in this blogpost is the most simple way to do it, but it also gets impractical when you want two or more layers of variants, as you need.

With a small amount of .NET coding against the Tea Commerce .NET API, you will be able to do some crazy stuff. Everything on the order and orderline can be edited, which mean you can add the variant information to the orderline just like you want.

You will have two obstacles (which will have many possible solutions):
1. How do you store the information about the possible variants for each product.
2. How do you keep track of the stock of each variant.

Some solutions:
1. You can store this information anyway you like as long as you can loop them out in the UI and make it possible for the user to select them somehow. When the user have them selected you can just use the Tea Commerce javascript API to send the choices to the server with either one of the add orderline methods or the add orderline property method.
When you have the data on the server, you can use the .NET api to change the product id, product name or whatever, on the product node. You will only need ONE product node per product this way and just add the variant information afterwards.

2. This one is harder. In Tea Commerce we have a pretty advanced system for handling stock. You will probably need to store the stock of the individual variants somewhere and then change it in the .NET order finalized event.

Just to sum up the process:
1. Store the variant possibilities somewhere. On the product or anywhere else.
2. Show the product to the customer and make him choose what variant he wants.
3. Add the product and the variant choice information to the cart/order using the javascript API
4. Handle any changes of the order and orderline in the .NET api. Maybe in the orderlineadded event.

Hope this helps.

/Rune

Thanks for providing these blog posts on setting up Tea Commerce – they’re a big help! Being completely new to Umbraco and Tea Commerce, I was curious how you’d handle the situation of a product having multiple variant types. For example, I’m setting up a product catalog that contains t-shirts which can have different sizes and colors.

Ideally I don’t want to create a product for size small and color black and another for size small and color red. Having said that, I’m curious if Tea Commerce requires the product to actually exist as a content node if I don’t care about inventory. If it doesn’t care, can I just append the selected size and color to the end of a base product ide?

For example, if I had a product with product ID: MT0001, could I append the size and color to the end of the product ID (MT0001_S_Black) when adding it to the cart?

Thanks in advance for your response!

Best,
Ryan

Theres no writing concerning the change of the javascript API anywhere. An example would be the addOrderline method which now looks like this:

/// <summary>
/// Adds an orderline to the current order.
/// If the product is already present in the order, the quantity will be added to the orderline
/// If async is set to false addOrderLine will return the newly added orderLine
/// </summary>
/// <param name=”nodeId”>Id of the product node</param>
/// <param name=”quantity”>Number of products to add</param>
/// <param name=”settings”>Extra settings for the call</param>
/// <setting name=”async”>Set to false if the call should be syncronous</setting>
/// <setting name=”successfn”>function to call when the command has been completet</setting>
/// <setting name=”errorfn”>function to call if the command has failed</setting>
/// <setting name=”properties”>Ekstra orderline properties. These will be added alongside the secure properties from the product node, but cannot overwrite the them.</setting>
/// <returns>An OrderlinesUpdated Json object containing the affected orderLine</setting>
TeaCommerce.addOrderLine(nodeId, quantity, settings)

When installing correctly Tea Commerce will remove the old package from the package list. I hate it when theres the same package a hundred times.

/Rune