Discussions

Understanding Product Display Nodes

Hello - complete newbie here...

In Randy Fay's great video on importing products (/node/467), he has a second step of importing into product display nodes and thereby creating product reference nodes? I am getting lost in the terminology.

Is a product reference node a product display node that displays referenced products?

And why in his example does he import descriptions into the display node and not the product import? Maybe it was just for an example of what import can do and not necessarily a "best practices"? Seems like product detail info would fragmented and hard to chase down if it's not all on the product's own page?

thanks for any clarification.

-- Don

donok
Posted: May 7, 2011

Comments

Scott J on May 7, 2011

Yes, yes, and yes. It sounds like you are understanding it perfectly.

Products do not have descriptions. Does this make the info fragmented and hard to chase down? Well, the alternative is repeating the same information over and over and over for every product variation. I've done it that way before and I don't enjoy it. But, if you need it that way, I guess you can just add a new field to the product entity and name it 'description'.

The beauty of Commerce is that it uses core Drupal functionality, so you can bend it and mould it till it's just the way you like it.

ps.
I just watched the video, and Randy does say, "We could have put the description into a field on the product".