Viking Coders Miva Merchant Module Support and FAQ - I have select and radio type attributes in my store and I'm tracking the inventory of each option. However, when all of the attributes are out of stock, the prompt for the attribute still displays but without any options (and an empty drop down list for "select" type attributes). Can this be fixed?

Miva Merchant 4 Module FAQs » Inventory Manager (BROK_INVENTORY)

I have select and radio type attributes in my store and I'm tracking the inventory of each option. However, when all of the attributes are out of stock, the prompt for the attribute still displays but without any options (and an empty drop down list for "select" type attributes). Can this be fixed?

(2005/01/04)In the latest version of the module, empty "select" type lists will not be displayed if all of the individual options are out of stock. And so that the customer can be notified that none of the options are available for sale, you can display a message next to the attribute prompt. On the "Displaying Inventory" tab, in the "Attributes" section, the "setup" field is the template that will be used to display the message. Since there could be different "levels" assigned to the atribute options, there is an option "For attributes w/ all options out of stock use level:". Here you can specifiy what notification level to use if all of an attributes are out of stock. It is that level which is used to process tokens in the "Attributes" "setup" field. For example, by default, the "For attributes w/ all options out of stock use level:" is set to notification level 2 (the default "out of stock" notification level) and it is the details of that notification level that will be used for processing tokens, such as %attr_message% in the "setup" field.

Note that in older versions of the module, the "Setup" field for the Attributes section was something like:

(%inv_count% in stock)

which obviously would not vary depending on what the current notification level was. More recent versions have the default set to:

%attr_message%

which will display the "Attribute message" of the current notification level (which, in turn, may be set to display the current inventory count).

For those using the Inventory Manager's %module type tokens to control the display, I have added a "position", attr_display (eg. %module|BROK_INVENTORY|attr_display|%) which returns 1 if the attribute which the database is currently pointing is either not being tracked or has at least one "in stock" option and returns a 0 if all of the options are out of stock (more speicifically, if their current level has an action of "prevent display" or "prevent sale"). In the "Product Page Template" and "Category Page Templates" modules this would be used in the "Radio attr. template" or in the "Select attr. template" fields. It can be used to control whether or not the options are displayed (to prevent empy select type lists) and to display the appropriate message.