[jira] [Created] (OFBIZ-5393) Improve product features and feature selection order entry to better handle highly configurable products

["Christian Carlow (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Christian Carlow created OFBIZ-5393:
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             Summary: Improve product features and feature selection order entry to better handle highly configurable products
                 Key: OFBIZ-5393
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5393
             Project: OFBiz
          Issue Type: Improvement
    Affects Versions: SVN trunk
            Reporter: Christian Carlow


OFBiz product features and order entry feature selection form should be improved to better handle highly configurable products.  By highly configurable I mean that I have 30 feature types or more, some of which should be considered optional and others that have a wide range of possible values.

I'm dealing with purchase orders of glass materials for which multiple optical properties can be specified as features.  The refractive index of the glass is a very specific decimal number that ranges very narrowly for different variations of the same glass but widely for different glass products.  Because of this I chose to create a separate productFeatureCategory for every glass product that gets created instead of a more general "Glass Features" productFeatureCategory so that the list of refractive indexes will be limited only to those that apply.  

Currently the order entry feature selection form requires all features to selected before the form can be submitted and the product variant added to the order.  I considered just creating an "_NA_" feature option for the optional fields but it could become very cumbersome for the user to have to enter a separate "_NA_" feature option for every individual product created.  Also, when dealing with 30 or more potential features, having to select "_NA_" repeatedly for optional features would become fairly inconvenient.

Having an "OPTIONAL_SELECT_FEATURE" productFeatureApplTypeId could serve to indicate that a feature should be considered optional.  This could be used to distinguish between required selections and allow forms to be submitted without an optional being selected.  

Product variants would have to be changed to account for configurations where some feature values are not assign to a value.

Anyone dealing with configurable products like this?



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