Creating variants programmatically

Hi,

You don't need to set product_parent_id in each variant. However, when calling the updateCharacteristics function, you need to provide the product_id of the product in the second parameter. Also, you should set the third parameter to 2.

The call to updateCharacteristics in the save function is used to generate the link between the product and the characteristics, as well as the link between the product and the default value of each characteristic, so it's not a good example of how to call updateCharacteristics to generate the variants of a product selectively.
I would rather recommend looking at the populateVariant function. That's the function called by HikaShop when you use the "add variants" button and you select the characteristics and the values for which you want the variants to be generated. In it, you can see that it does two things before calling updateCharacteristics. First, it fills $elem->oldCharacteristics with the result of a call to getProductCharacteristics. This provide the data of the characteristics linked to the product. Second, it fills the $elem->characteristics array with objects, one per characteristic, and in each object, an array of values in the values attribute.
I think this fits a lot better to what you're trying to do.
Note that this will basically create the variant entry in the hikashop_product table, and the links between each variant and its corresponding value for each characteristic in the hikashop_variant table. Then, you still need to save each variant individually if you wish to provide data for each variant with the save function.

Hi,

1. The populateVariant function doesn't provide that capability as it is not needed by HikaShop. Thus, you would have to run a MySQL query on the hikashop_product table in order to get the product_id of the variants.

2. So, before you use the populateVariant function to generate the variants, you indeed first need to link the parent product with the characteristics. You can call the updateCharacteristics function with your $product object with an attribute characteristics, which is an array like this:

$firstCharacteristic = new stdClass();
$firstCharacteristic->characteristic_id = 1; // id of the characteristic in the hikashop_characteristic table
$firstCharacteristic->default_id = 2; // id of the default value in the hikashop_characteristic table

$secondCharacteristic = new stdClass();
$secondCharacteristic->characteristic_id = 2;
$secondCharacteristic->default_id = 4;

$product->characteristics = array(
  $firstCharacteristic->characteristic_id => $firstCharacteristic,
  $secondCharacteristic->characteristic_id => $secondCharacteristic,
);

// then, you can call updateCharacteristics on $product

Hi,

You can set all the ordering to 0 I think and it will use the order in which you add them.
Otherwise, you can use incremental numbers starting at 1.

Hi,

You would use the same updateCharacteristics function with the $product->characteristics array set with the new characteristic values.
That's what is done in the backSaveVariantForm function of the same class which is called when you save a variant edit form in the backend since this interface allows you to change the values of a variant. So you can look in this backSaveVariantForm. Now, most of the code in there is irrelevant. It's the piece inside the

if(hikashop_acl('product/variant/characteristics')) {