Question

I’m trying to create configurable products programmatically in Magento 1.5.1.
I understand I need first to create simple related products, what I did. Now I manage to associate these simple products to make a configurable one.

Here is the critical part…
I keep the ids and some of the attributes values in an array, so I can later make my configurable product, but some of them are missing, I don’t know which method to call.
I found this entry in Magento Wiki, that helped me and seems to fit my needs.
However, at the end the author is setting two things :

$product->setConfigurableProductsData($data);
$product->setConfigurableAttributesData($data);

and the values in the arrays have been taken in the admin page source using Firebug….and then translated into PHP arrays (array example for the first call) :

“I’ve harcoded the values for my associated products and attribute
data. You can get attribute data by viewing the source through the
admin interface and using Firebug for Firefox.”

$data = array('5791'=>array('0'=>array('attribute_id'=>'491', // I already got this
                                       'label'=>'vhs',        // this too
                                       'value_index'=>'5',    // but what is value_index ?
                                       'is_percent'=>0,
                                       'pricing_value'=>'')),
              '5792'=>array('0'=>array('attribute_id'=>'491',
                                       'label'=>'dvd',
                                       'value_index'=>'6',
                                       'is_percent'=>0,
                                       'pricing_value'=>'')));

My question is : is there a way to retrieve these values without using Firebug (which in my script won’t help me a lot !), but programmatically. I already found a way to retrieve attribute values, labels, etc… using its code, but one field I don’t know is value_index.
I guess this may be the option position in an option list, but not sure.
Also if someone knows a good/better way to create a configurable product in Magento, please tell me.
Any help is welcome thank you.

Answer 1

It seems you’re asking where to retrieve the value_index value where you already have the label. Here’s what I had: I didn’t test this on 1.5x.

function get_attribute_id($option, $type) {
   $attributeId      = Mage::getResourceModel('eav/entity_attribute')->getIdByCode('catalog_product', $type);
   $attribute        = Mage::getModel('catalog/resource_eav_attribute')->load($attributeId);
   $attributeOptions = $attribute->getSource()->getAllOptions();

   foreach ($attributeOptions as $opts_arr) {
       if (strtoupper($opts_arr['label']) == strtoupper($option)) {
          return $opts_arr['value'];
       }
    }
    return FALSE;
}

$value_index = get_attribute_id('vhs', 'media_format');

No one else seemed to mention the easiest way to figure out what the value_index of vhs is: In the backend, under
Catalog > Manage > media_format > Manage Label/Options
Inspect the source of the individual form inputs. Where you have ‘vhs’ you should have an input named option[value][6]