So apparently the support you get from Varien when you purchase the Enterprise Edition is next to worthless so I am hoping that someone here can maybe lead me in the right direction.
In Magento I am would like to create a product attribute that is the type int. When I create the attribute from the admin panel it creates it as a varchar.
What I am ultimately trying to do is create a total sold attribute so that I can use it for sorting by most sold products in the category display. The problem with it being varchar is that when you sort by this, it sorts it as a string and not a number.
Varien told me that in order to get this to be an integer I would have to do an update to the database. It looks like to me that I would have to change the backend_type column in the eav_attribute table to int and that should hopefully move the values to catalog_product_entity_int table instead of it going to catalog_product_entity_varchar table. Does this make sense? Has anyone else done this before?
Now that I have that question out there, is this what I should expect from the support from Varien? So far their support seem pretty useless. It seems that asking how to do something this simple would not be a big deal (especially since I asked them how to do it, and not to do it for me)
I’ve never tried to change the type of an existing attribute before, and I try to stay out of fiddling directly with the mysql database structure. It’s sort of like directly changing the contents of a memory location in a running desktop application; you can do it, but unless you know exactly what you’re doing chances are you’ll leave something in an unsupported state. Also, I can’t prove this, but I’m pretty sure the specifics of the EAV implementation has chanced over the lifetime of the product, which means different versions would have different answers.
If you can start over from scratch, I’d add an attribute to the model programmatically (around the “Final Array of Key Value Pairs that Define the Attribute” header). Even if you can’t start over from scratch, create an integer attribute programmatically and diff your database before and after to see what needs to happen on the backend for an attribute to be created.