AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

SolunarServices wrote:Your needs are pretty specialized. The only way I could see them being accomplished would be the custom table route. Along that same route would be a highly customized BuyProductDialog user control.

Swatches would only accomplish a portion of your need. A swatch is a graphical representation of a single choice. From what you've described, there are multiple choices to be made. Using multiple swatch selections might bring you closer to your need, however your ability to manage page layout with swatches would be extremely limited.

Even using swatches, you're going to want to display the final representation of your product to your visitor. Since you're "constructing" that final representation on-the-fly, you're still going to need the custom code to accomodate the various combinations possible.

So the good news is the flexibility of the AC7 .Net programming gives you the ability to accomplish what you need. The bad news is you have quite a bit of programming ahead of you.

SolunarServices wrote:Try looking into the AC7 kit functionality - might be a good route to explore. That would give you the flexibility to still control the user interface but take advantage of the kitting to handle costs and cart functionality. In other words, build your own kit visitor-side interface instead of using Ables.

Then you're only modifying behind-the-scenes code and not the core cart functionality.

Thanks for the pointers. Just so i understand you, do you mean to use the kit functions to make extras and then flag my product as having a kit extra if they have added custom images to it? Then i can simply say hasKitExtra (as an example) and the cart will add the additional cost for me?

SolunarServices wrote: Sort of. Your situation sounds as if kits would work fine as-is, you just lack the graphical aspect of the user interface. If you could manipulate the visitor-side interface for kits to meet your graphics needs, the rest of AC7 (order processing, shipments etc) would probably work fine for you unmodified. A custom user control that could display kit parameters in the graphical form you require would be a good way to go.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<product xmlns="http://mysite.com/api/" productID="1" colorSkuID="1" baseCost="20.0" thumbURL="product1Thmb.png">
	
	<productView ViewID="1" title="Front" description="This is the front view of the product">
		<baseImageURL>product1FrontView.png</baseImageURL>
		<canAddText>true</canAddText>
		<canAddImages>true</canAddImages>
		<printCost>5.00</printCost>
		<userImage>myDesign.jpg</userImage>
		<userText>Happy Fathers Day</userText>
	</productView>
	
	<productView ViewID="2" title="Side" description="This is the side view of the product">
		<viewImageURL>product1SideView.png</viewImageURL>
		<canAddText>true</canAddText>
		<canAddImages>true</canAddImages>
		<printCost>5.00</printCost>
		<userImage>mySideDesign.jpg</userImage>
		<userText>Love Michael</userText>
	</productView>
	
	<productView ViewID="3" title="Back" description="This is the back view of the product">
		<viewImageURL>product1BackView.png</viewImageURL>
		<canAddText>true</canAddText>
		<canAddImages>true</canAddImages>
		<printCost>5.00</printCost>
		<userImage></userImage>
		<userText></userText>
	</productView>
	
</product>