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Currently, the site search will search all of the skus of the items marked as being visible in search. This is all well and good.

The problem arises when the customer knows a sku of the individual child item. So, let's say a product comes in both a 20 foot and 25 foot variation. We would put those into a configurable product and have a single product page where a customer could then choose which of those two lengths.

What happens is, a customer invariably knows that the sku of the 20 ft variation is RDB-20, while the other is RDB-25. A search for RDB-25 then, comes back with no results since the simple product is not visible in search - it doesn't realize there is a match.

How do I get the search to search an item with visibility "Not Visible Individually", when it's parent is visible in search?

The desired effect is that, if a child SKU is searched for, the parent should show up in the results.

mattbryanswan
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2 Answers2

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There really is no good way of doing it without extending the default search, but at that point you might as well look for other options.

Here's a workaround that might be doable depending on how you manage your products and it worked for me until I moved on from the default search.

Rather than altering the search, try adding an attribute to all products and make it hidden concatenating all the skus into this field. The search should find the text attribute and show the configurable.

Its a bit of a workaround but works for me.

Tom
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  • Hi kreative - I like this as a workaround, but do you automate the population of that field, or is it something you have to manage - i.e. if you add another child (or remove one) do you have to go back to the field to manually update it? – mattbryanswan Aug 16 '11 at 17:06
  • I do all my product imports via rapidflow so it's a bit easy for me. But you should be able to do it through a data flow. – Tom Aug 16 '11 at 18:33
  • What about when it changes? So, you use data flow to import it and there are three sizes, so the attribute field is something like "ProductSmall,ProductMed,ProductLarge", but then the small is discontinued. Do you do a new import via RapidFlow? Or, how do you handle that update? Do you have to do it by hand? – mattbryanswan Aug 16 '11 at 19:07
  • I have master data that generates the import. If its discontinued the sku in the concatenated field. – Tom Aug 16 '11 at 19:09
  • oops just saw my typo. if its discontinued the sku does not make it to the field. – Tom Aug 16 '11 at 20:12
  • Oh ok - thanks for the clarification, kreative. We're managing our products from inside Magento, so I would need to probably set up a daily process (or more frequent) to check and update this field programmatically. – mattbryanswan Aug 16 '11 at 20:33
  • Thanks for the assist, Walter. This worked just fine. I have a cron job set up to check/update the field so there is little delay to a configurable product change and the update in the search engine. – mattbryanswan Aug 29 '11 at 15:49
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    This is still a generic issue with Magento and interesting it has not been resolved in the core, we do have an extension that updates parent search with child attributes on reindex and product save working with standard search and solr, otherwise it is a manual update or automated update with cron. – Serpyre Jan 16 '14 at 09:09
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This is untested, but I did a bit of perusing in our attributes and I think I found something that might help.

Currently since our child products don't show up in our search, we have the parent populate with the children product's attributes.

However, things like brand, taxable amount, description, populate for every child product while our SKU does not.

The only difference I can see between the two attributes is under manage attributes -> click on attribute -> and then under properties go to frontend properties and select

  • Use In Search Results Layered Navigation: YES
  • Used in Product Listing: YES
  • Use In Layered Navigation: Filterable (with results)

I'm not sure which of these do what, but in the population of the fulltext search data table, somewhere it is being told to populate for the children and I believe that the admin panel is where.

I hope this helps!

Nathaniel Wendt
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  • I'm not exactly sure what you mean - are you saying something similar to kreative above - where you have an additional attribute where you keep all of the child SKUs? I think that could work, but do you automate it somehow? We have a considerable number of configurable products, that I wouldn't want to manage this – mattbryanswan Aug 16 '11 at 17:09