Attributes

    "Attributes" or "Characteristics" are rarely changed product part. Most often, they are created and added to the product during its import, in add mode.

    Before adding them to the product, the attributes are created in the OpenCart admin panel:

    and can be grouped in "Attribute Groups".

    Attribute Groups

    An attributes group contains related attributes that can be compared under Product Comparison. For example:

    • attribute group describing product design: color, shape…
    • attribute group describing technical characteristics: power, speed…
    • etc.

    You should not create attribute groups that can themselves be attributes, for example: "CPU frequency".

    Notice

    Optionally, it can be renamed to "General" or something else which is appropriate for your site.

    Group #1 is used by the plugin when parsing attributes and it has no way of determining which group each attribute belongs to.

    If the attribute is added from the price list, then its Group can be specified using the symbols ->

    The plugin does not automatically create attribute groups, it uses ready-made groups manually created in advance.

    Attributes

    Like an attribute group, each attribute has its own ID (attribute_id), which is assigned to it by OpenCart during creation.

    Only the Attribute ID is recorded in the product data, not the name, which makes it possible to change the attribute names in the admin panel so that it changes in all products at once.

    The plugin can create attributes automatically in the OpenCart admin panel. This is the option "create" underlined in red in the "Attributes" settings:

    And after creation, add the attribute to the product, the option "add".

    By default, the attribute name length in OpenCart should not exceed 64 bytes (32 Cyrillic letters). After the plugin installation, this value will increase to 256 bytes.

    However, it happens that the attribute name length still turns out to be longer and is cut off when writing to the database. As a result, the attribute name will contain a truncated character (an illegal character). In this case, the plugin will not be able to determine that such an attribute has already been created and will create duplicates.

    Attribute duplicates

    Each duplicate will get its own attribute_id and will be added to the product. It turns out that a separate attribute has been created for each new product. Since each attribute is linked to the product, it will be impossible to delete them in the admin panel.

    The "Delete duplicate attributes in admin" tool will help to fix the problem. But before using it, you need to rename the duplicated attributes in the admin panel to something short and identical for all duplicates, for example, "abc"

    The tool will look through all the products in the store and overwrite the attributes in products "abc" with different attribute_id, to one attribute "abc" with one attribute_id, and the rest "abc" attributes will be removed.

    Attribute values

    Attribute values are not created in the admin panel, but are asigned directly to the product. The value can be of unlimited length and can consist of multiple values separated by commas:

    Technical: vertical,horizontal

    There are some Opencart Filter modules that can separate the attribute values by predefined separators (comma, semicolon…). In this case, the Filter will be able to filter the products both by the value "vertical" and by the value "horizontal"

    In the "Tools" tab there are functions for working with attribute values:

    The names of the functions are self-explanatory, and functions 1 and 2 are explained below.

    1. Delete the duplicate values in the attribute (Field1).

    Let's say the following attribute was added to the product:

    Technical: vertical,horizontal,vertical

    After applying the Tool, the extra word in the attribute "Technical" will be deleted in all products:

    2. Find and Replace in attribute values

    This tool applies to all attribute names and all values:

    Here, you can replace "watt" to "W", "kilogram" to "kg", "gram" to "g" etc.

    If an attribute value is used in the Opencart default filter, then when changing it in the product, it is also necessary to change it in the Filter:

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