Parent item out stock/Child item in stock

[danielson5000]

Hi all.

I have searched for a solution to this but have not found anything  that works. really need a solution.

When a parent item is out of stock it is displayed in category list ( I have enabled 'show stock').

The problem is that children are in stock. The user sees parent out of stock and naturally assumes that that product has sold out. In fact the chidden are fully stocked.

It's a usability issue primarily I guess but also a major pain because this means we will not sell child items.

Does anybody know a way to do either if these things:

Either:

1. Hack some code so that when parent is out of stock could the child products become listed in category page instead of nested in the parent product page. (in the same way that when parent is unpublished and children is assigned to a category).

or

2. Hack the product default page to not show add to cart on parent so that user has to select an option form the 'child generic variant" custom field. This would effectivly make the parent a 'category parent' and not a parent product which could be ordered.  There was away of hacking the code on VM1.

Or

any other cheeky solution

Thanks in advance

Joomla 2.5, VM 2.0.6

Daniel