Hikashop Google Products Plugin Missing Variants?

Hi Nicolas,

I've only paraphrased what you have said previously and which you repeat here. You have argued that there isn't the demand for handling variants with Google products (unnecessary) and that it is very complex (can't be done), but let's not argue about that. It's not my intention to cause offence as I have every respect for what you have achieved with Hikashop,

I am by no means a programmer but have managed to make a version of the plugin that works with variants, it took me time but it wasn't technically that hard (thanks in part to your responses to my questions) but there are performance issues. It works with my site that has only 600 variants but Hal has tried it and gets time outs with 3000 variants. I suspect that this is largely due to the way the plugin is written, by loading all the product data into an array and using nested polling loops to process it which seems to me to be a very resource intensive way of doing it. In my post above I have offered to share what I have done with you if you can look at the parts that use these arrays and have them rewritten to be more efficient, maybe by using smarter SQL queries.

I'm not in a position to give you millions of euros, if I were I wouldn't still be working at this time of night, but I have given you several hundred for a product which has a very extensive feature list already, but frustratingly some features that don't work as well or as fully as might be expected. This has cost me a lot, hence my frustration.

If you can't help with this then I'll carry on but it will take a lot longer, and when I have it ready you can pay me some of those euros

Ian

I don't really understand this, forgive my simplicity.

Could you please confirm the following?

1) If I had a setup which had 2000 products, but no variants, I wouldn't have a problem using the current google shopping plugging. However, If I have 500 products with 4 variants (2000), then it's too resource intensive using the current plugin set up? (If it was designed to include variants, that is!)

2) Why can't each variant be treated as a product? If a required cell of information is empty then this can be sourced from the main product listing. Alternatively, on creating a variant of a main product, the information cells could be automatically populated with the information of the main product (This could be a yes/no checkbox within the main settings).

As always, thank you for your time.

This is directly from the page that you linked to regarding item grouping:

"All items that are variants of the same product must have the same item group id. If you have a “Parent SKU” that is shared by all variants of a product, you can provide that as the value for 'item group id'."

It would be logical to use the 'Product code' as the item group identifier. This can already be assigned within the main product.

There is an issue using this plugin with a large number of products where it can timeout usually generating a 500 server error. In the server log you'll see something like ...

[Wed Dec 02 13:37:46 2015] [warn] [client xx.xxx.xxx.xxx] mod_fcgid: read data timeout in 45 seconds, referer:
then the URL of the script

This is because the plugin performance configuration is setting the php "max_execution_timeout" parameter but in a fast cgi environment you also need to set the 'FcgidIOTimeout".

If you are having this problem look up how to set 'FcgidIOTimeout" for your hosting. In my case I set this to 240 (seconds) and it works fine.

Ian

I hope Nicolas doesn't mind me posting this here but for anybody else wanting to use variants with Google Products I'm now offering a plugin customisation service.

With the help of Holmes-Pierce I have rewritten the plugin to work with variants and to overcome the performance limitations of the original. Holmes-Pierce has it working on his site, elevateyoursole , with 1600 variants. I have it working on my site Artist Papers with 600 variants.

As Nicolas says it's difficult to make a plugin that will accommodate everyone's requirements as there are many ways of using variants, so customisation seems to be the way to go to develop this further.

A bit more background on my blog here or contact me with what you are needing to do.

Ian

i reverse the way variant logic is implemented using SQL proxy to follow how variant are create .
Does this method can resolve the issue only for export not use by hihashop in joomla :
1- create " structure " for each characteristic a specific field in product table
2- create/insert "data" in this table relative to number of variant use in hikashop

here a captrue screen of mysql table / GUI BE where column value contain both value and label field name !!!
jos_hikashop_product.product_code = jos_hikashop_product.product_code value + _number ( _1 _ 2 _ 3)
number = hikashop_characteristic.characteristic_id

regard's