Product Attributes and Specifications

I am new to nopCommerce, so if I'm in error, sorry.

I have a Group of Products that share the same attribute and values.  i.e.  They come in Red, Green, Blue, etc...

At this point if I want to define color squares, I have to do it individually for each product, or I export my items into Excel and Copy the corresponding lines from the first product to all the others.  It would be easier, if the Color Squares are pre-defined in the Attributes page and then added to the corresponding products.  Granted there will remain some customization to fit each product.

The Other thing is the ability to assign Specifications to a Category or Subcategory.  i.e.  For Televisions, Screen Size would be a required specification for all Televisions, HDMI inputs, PC input, etc.....  So why not have the ability to assign it to the category which contains televisions?

I think you can go to Admin -> Catalog -> Attributes -> Product attributes, then add your attribute and add some predefined values into that so same values would be used as a predefined template in each product where you add this product attribute.
Moreover, you can choose color squares when you configure this attribute in product attributes in product edit.
I hope i am guiding you in right direction.

Thank you,
Atul Rungta
Xcellence-It | nopAccelerate

azghul wrote:
Easiest way to achieve this is to create a template product that has all the product attributes for that type of product already linked. When you want to create a new product of that type you open the template product for editing, click the Copy product button and just delete the unnecessary product attribute values.

azghul wrote:
Someone added this functionality to an earlier version of nop in a fork and made a pull request back in 2014 but it didn't get merged: https://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/SourceControl/network/forks/vadimburshtyn/CategoryAttributes/contribution/7506. Unfortunately the copy from template product trick mentioned above doesn't work so well for specification attributes since you can't edit their values once they've been added. You could still add every possible value for the relevant spec attribute to the template product and delete the unnecessary ones from the copied product but it's still potentially a lot of work. I think I remember seeing some recent commits on the Github dev branch that indicate that spec attribute value editing will be introduced (reintroduced? I'm sure it was possible in older versions) in v3.9

I currently use a SQL query to identify "missing" attributes. The query assumes that if any one product in that category has a value for that spec attribute then every product in the category should have a value and returns a list of missing product/attribute combinations. Though we limit this to only look at spec attributes that are used for filtering since that's where the gaps start to show most obviously.