How to increase limit on number of options

[jenn13]

Hi, I'm importing products from the customer's old website (not Able Commerce) into the new Able Commerce site. They have some products with more than 8 options. Where does that 8 option limit happen, and will I be able to increase that somehow?

[mazhar]

What is your application version? In 7.0.3 you can add more then 8 options.

[jenn13]

Thank you for your reply
We have 7.0.2 right now. I'll just have to tell them we need to upgrade to 7.0.3 to accommodate the products.
Will I need to make any code change to accommodate more than 8 options, or is that supported out of the box?

[mazhar]

Sorry I think I miss understood the case. Even in 7.0.2 you can create more then 8 options but if you create variants application will limit you to variants with 8 options. You can not use variant grid to track variants for options greater then 8. 7.0.3 have the same functionality. So if you haven't any requirement of tracking something at variant level then you try to setup your product with more then 8 options and provide option specific settings. Secondly you can't make any code change to make variant grid accommodate variants for more then 8 options.

[jenn13]

If you mean needing to actually view the variants in the grid in the provided variant management screen, that's not important as far as I know.
I originally ported the products directly from the old site's database to the AbleCommerce database, creating the options and choices, and saving the combinations that actually represent valid variants to a file. Now, I've written an extra page for the Admin which will get all the variants for a product, and read from my file to set the invalid variants to "not available", and set the price and sku for the valid variants. As long as the 8 option limit doesn't prevent this from working, I think we're fine.
As there are over 7000 products, some of which have enough options/choices to generate tens of thousands of variants (of which only a few are actually valid), manually updating these through the grid on the management screen isn't an option.

I'm glad you let me know about that when you did, I was just about to start on the upgrade.

[Logan Rhodehamel]

If you mean needing to actually view the variants in the grid in the provided variant management screen, that's not important as far as I know.

I think the limit actually just applies to the variant grid. It will ignore options past the first eight. As you state in your post, with that number of options the possible number of combinations can become astronomical.

As long as you are accomodating that with custom code (the file parsing you discussed) there should not be a problem in importing more than 8 options.