AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hi everyone,

We are using AbleCommerce GoldR6 (build 6169). We are trying to customize the source to fit our needs. We are new to this system.

Some of our requirements include:
1. Ability to create an instance of a product(in the cart) that is based on but not truly Able Commerce product that contains some custom data(hidden) set to the cart item product. For ex. a gift card with a thumbnail image. We want to over ride thumbnail of the cart item and not of the product's.
2. Ability to create some internal fields(invisible to user) that contain some product specific metadata in the product setup. We want to use this data to do some logic when the user opens the product. Let us say, the user belongs to a group, we want to show some additional fields on the product details. We are using CustomFields. Is this the right choice. These custom Fields don't have a page to edit on the Admin and even if set as Invisible in the database are showing up in the Product Page.
3. Ability to create some internal fields(invisible to user) that can be set with some data. As in 2. above, we want to capture the additional field data(hidden or other wise) and set the values to these internal fields.
4. For the instance of the product we want to create in 1. above, we want to be able to keep it's identity and quantity if more than instance of the Able product is made. Right now, it doesn't create an extra line item in the cart, it merges them into one product and increases the quantity.

Can you please provide some direction.

Thanks

Sai

Hello Sai,

Welcome to the AbleCommerce forums.

I'm having a little trouble following some of the project requirements you have. It might be worthwhile to schedule a consultation with an experienced AbleCommerce partner. Here is a link if you're interested -

http://www.ablecommerce.com/Development ... 11C33.aspx

I also wanted to mention that you should be able to utilize the Product Template feature (aka Custom Fields). This is under the Catalog > Product Templates page. You can create unique fields that are only available to admin (merchant) users. These can then be assigned to one or more products. Here is a link for more info -

http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... plates.htm

Product Kitting also has the unique ability to assign other products (hidden or public) to a master product. If hidden, then only the administration can view the information in the order that was placed.

Kitting:
http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... s/kits.htm

After reviewing these features, it might give you a little more direction, or at least a baseline for further customization of Items 2. and 3. I didn't quite follow what you needed for 1.

Maybe a developer can help with Item 4. It seems like this would be a fairly simple customization, but I'm not sure if you need the full source code to accomplish it.

Thanks,
Katie

You can do most, if not all, of this without modifying the source code, if by source code you mean the code that you would have had to purchase separately.
If you are not using source code, but are using the WAP version, then you need to make your changes and compile the project. If you are using WSP version, you don't need to compile- the site will recompile when the code is changed. That makes the site a little slower starting up, but you don't have to keep a separate project going. Here are some examples of what you can do:
1. You can assign thumbnail images to options, like Able does with their sample LAN cable product, and then change the code in the basket to show the option thumbnail instead of the image thumbnail.
2 & 3.Custom fields are a good choice in a lot of cases because if the Able software is upgraded, that code gets automatically upgraded if you are using Able methods to handle them. If you drill down to your product page components, you will see a conlib file called ProductCustomFieldDialog. You can hide the custom fields there so that they won't show on the product page. You just need to do some detective work to see what drives all this.
4. You can keep the basket from combining items by storing something distinct to each item in the linemessage field- those won't show to the customer, but the basket won't combine things.

With some creativity and knowledge of the way Able handles things, you can do almost anything to the software. I've probably worked on at least 100 sites and the only time I've had to do something to change source code is to pull out some of the source code, modify it, and use that instead of Able's code for that function.

Ok, that was like so much better than my answer Thanks Judy, you really are an AbleCommerce Angel

That was really helpful Julie, especially the linemessage part. Thanks to you too Katie. Really appreciate your answers.

The solution point 1 is not what we have in mind.

In AC there is a product, and then variants of the product right. We are taking one of this variant and customizing it to set our own data. Linemessage for example. In our custom code we have users create a custom product based on this variant. In the custom product, the user customizes artwork and wants to order it. We want to show the customized thumbnail of this artwork in the cart/order.

For ex: AC has a giftcard product right. It has a generic thumbnail image and we may create variants and they all can have their thumbanils, but that is on the admin side. What we are trying to do is ability to put a product with its thumbnail(created by the user), not the variant's or product's thumbnail.

Thanks for your input.