Vasilis Giannopoulos

Currently if you have 2 categories that have product attribute groups with common attributes and you try to change the category on a product from one category to the other, then the program deletes all product attribute values, even for the common attributes. For example let's say you have a category called "LCD Monitors" and this category has a product attribute group linked to it with all the attributes of a monitor, e.g. size, resolution, etc. And you set this category to 10 monitors and set the product attribute values to these monitors. Now you decide to create another category called "LED Monitors" and assign the same attribute group to this category too. If you go into one of the monitors and try to update the category and change it from "LCD Monitors" to "LED Monitors", then all the product attribute values of the attributes will be lost. Imagine having around 50 product attributes to a category with 500 products and ending losing all attribute values, because you decided to add the products to a new category! The correct behavior should be that it should keep the attribute values for the attributes that are common. If we had deleted the category and inserted a new category, I understand that the attribute values should have been deleted, but we are only changing the category. Even now, on updating the product category, the program checks if the attributes exist on any other category of the product, before deleting them, but it does not check the new category, which a major flaw in my opinion! We tried to open an incident about it, but we were told that this is the standard behavior and that we should suggest it as a new idea! So, I am suggesting that updating a product category should not delete the product attribute values, if the attributes are linked to the new category as well.

If you have a product attribute group linked to a commerce hierarchy category and you add a new attribute to this attribute group and set a default value, then this attribute does not get a default value for the products of that category automatically. Only when the product attribute form gets opened, is the default value being created. Imagine having an attribute group linked to a category with 1000 products and you want to add a new attribute with a default value. You would think that the logical behavior would be that the default value is created in each product. Unfortunately this is not done. The user has to go into each product and open the product attributes form, in order to have the values created! This has been reported as an incident, but we were told that this has been investigated before for other incidents and that this behavior is by design and the reason this is done like that, is due to performance issues! We consider this to be unacceptable. You cannot have wrong data, because of performance issues! The user should at least be notified that adding an attribute does not set the default values on the products. We suggest that this should be fixed and that when an attribute is added on a attribute group, then the default values are created on all the products where this attribute group has been linked to. We could also have a button on the attribute groups, in order to set the default values on products on demand, in case the attributes don't have values on the products already.