How to create advanced custom product options in general?

Question

It should be created a shop for eyeglasses. Therfore I want to create a product for each glasses frame and need to ask the customer for special details depending on his prescriptions.

The following dropdowns are required for each glasses frame:

• The Sphere for the right eye (float values between -14.00 and +9.00 in steps of 0.25)
• The Sphere for the left eye
• The Cylinder for the right eye
• The Cylinder for the left eye
• The Axis for the left eye
• The Axis for the right eye
• Maybe some more...

I think advanced products will not do the trick because it makes no sense to create the glasses like i would do it with t-shirt colors for example. I have no stock of glasses, every glass will be created on request by the store owner.

I don't want to create the options for every new product manually in admin section. It should be something like a product type glasses which implements these options.

I did some experiments with custom Input types based on this tutorial: http://magento.ikantam.com/qa/custom-input-types-custom-options

The questions are:

• Is it the right way to use custom option types for that?
• If not, what is the right way?
• Is it possible in general to create one custom option type which results in 6 dropdowns with 6 possible values (maybe store it as serialized array in db) or do i have to create 6 custom option types?
• Do you have further ideas or experience in extending magento like this?

I know the question is maybe too general and very basic. I am new to magento and cannot find anything about advanced options in the docs. Hope it is the right place here to ask this.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

In order to create options with unlimited possibilities I would use mageworx extension advanced custom options

You can read what it does here.

I was amazed with results, conditional options (hide/show). You can create templates for glasses. You can use templates for each shape or for each grade. You can create 1 template and use to assign it as many products as you want, no need to recreate it for each product.

Yes, it cost money but it worth every penny!

Answer 2

For that purpose you can create 'dummy glasses product' which will contain custom options you want. It Should not be displayed on frontend and all other data could be dummy.

So now if you want to create a real glasses product you need to open your dummy product and duplicate it. Change data you need and that's it. Hope it will solve your issue.

• steven: yes I thought about that, but it is in fact very redundant way to solve the issue. I have a copy of all options in every product (thats not very nice for the db) and if something changes in my options then i need to change every product. Is there no smarter way by creating the options via template?
• oleksii.svarychevskyi: As far as I know in base magento functionality you cannot do that. Maybe you can find some extension but I din't know any.