Custom Field and Varieties

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5 years 6 months ago #306871

Hi,

we have a book (in fact it is many books, but lets keep it simple) that we would like to sell in
a) hardcopy
b) pdf
c) individual chapters of the book

We could not really figure out how to do this, without making the system really complicated, so for example having variants of the product (book).
Like variants
a) hardcopy
b) pdf
c) and from here 18 more vairants one for each chapter.

Anyway, so the idea is to have
a) hardcopy
b) pdf
c) individual chapters of the book
and when variant c) is selected a custom field should appear where the client could specify what chapter he wants.

I made a custom field appear via Display-Custom Fields- item-Text, but this custom field is displayed for all viariants.

Questions:
a) Is it possible to display the custom field (as required) only when the variant c) is selected?
b) Do you have any better idea (since you know Hikashop better) for what we want to do?

Thanks
Philipp

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5 years 6 months ago #306873

Hi,

a. With custom coding it could be done but not with the options available.

b. I don't think that you want to go with the custom fields. If you do then how do you manage the downloads ?
With the 20 variants solution, you can add the PDF of the whole book to the PDF variant, and the PDF of each chapter in each chapter variant. That way, when the customers purchase either of these, they will get the download links automatically for each chapter/book they purchased. So you won't have anything to manage.
If you were using custom fields, you would have either to manually send the files to the customers after their order, or develop a whole HikaShop plugin to add dynamically the download links to the order based on the custom fields. It's possible, but it will require some development.
You say that the 20 variants solution is complicated, but to me, it looks like the custom fields route is even more complicated.
In what way do you feel that the variants solution is complicated ? Maybe it would be better to see if something could be improved there.
For example, if your issue with the variants solution is that it would be a hassle for the customer to add to the cart all the different chapters they want, maybe you could change the "Characteristics selection method" setting of the HikaShop configuration to "list" and the "Add to cart on listings" setting to "global". That way, you would get on the product page a table of the variants with a quantity field for each variant and a global add to cart button at the bottom of the table. That way, your customer could easily add 10 chapters to the cart in one go.

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5 years 6 months ago #306916

Hi,

thanks for the detailed reply. I will try to answer why we were considering these options.

1) But first: Our username seems to be an email address. Could this be changed to a normal username to avoid spam?

a) With posting the forum post I submitted some data and also a link to one prototype book product. In case you want to have the look.

Indeed you are right: The main reason not going for the 20 variants was that the selection will be very long. So drop down did not seem good and a long list also did not seem very nice. The product description is the table of contents of the book and it is quite long, so if the variants list is long as well it looks kind of strange.

The idea was indeed, as you say, to send the PDF by email individually, also, because we are not expecting many sales. I would be 1-3 chapters per year or so. This is academic material, so the reason why it is online, is not profit, we are non-profit organisation, but rather scientific interest. So we wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

BTW, for automatic PDF downloads is there some option for PDF branding? Because if we send it by email, we could easily at least add the name of the person to each page of the pdf. It's not super secure of course, but ok, better than nothing.

For the variant solution, I would not really now where to put the list of options, top, bottom, .... Maybe I can code something to have the custom text field disappearing, or do something with ReReplacer or so.

What do you think?

Regards
Philipp

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5 years 5 months ago #306921

Hi,

1. We did get your message about that yesterday and replied that it was no problem changing it. We just would need you to tell us what username you would like (since you need it to log on the website). You didn't get the email reply in your email box ?

2. The link didn't came through. That's because it was your first message on the forum and it went through the validation system for the first message of new users to avoid spam. So I don't have that link unfortunately.

3. If you're ok with manually sending the PDF files, then a custom field is good too. In that case considering the display/hide of the custom field based on the selected variant is ok. If you know a bit of javascript, adding that is totally possible:
stackoverflow.com/questions/18353574/how...-any-drop-down-value
It would basically require adding some similar javascript (with the ids changed to the ones used on your product page) in the product page layout (you can use the "Display view files" setting of the HikaShop configuration to know which view file to edit and then edit it via the menu Display>views).

4. Regarding the branding of PDF files, I have two points:
- with HikaSerial ( www.hikashop.com/component/hikashop/product/17-hikaserial.html ) you have a PDF plugin whicha can allow you to generate custom PDF files automatically based on informations of the order/user. So it's possible to do that.
- with HikaSerial, there was a ebook plugin integrated with secure-ebook: www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/1...ins-secureebook.html
This plugin would allow you to have a DRM (same as in games, software or blurays to prevent piracy) in the PDF file so that the receiver wouldn't be able to copy it to someone else. That online DRM service has stopped, but it would be possible to develop a plugin for another service. That's the most "secure" way to sell digital goods.

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