Customer comments on each product

[quigley595]

Hi folks,
apologies for such a noob question, and the answer is probably in here somewhere, but I cant find it.
Im on VM2 .0.24b  and Joomla 2.5.14

I want to put a text area on each product for customer freeform comments, when they are adding the product to the shopping cart.........  can anyone point me in the right direction? 
Can it be done at all??  or is there an alternative???

thanks all....

Mike

[quigley595]

Anyone???   Can this be done easily???
apologies again for the noob question, but I really do need to do this.

cheers,
Mike

[jenkinhill]

You could use a Custom Field Type: text area in the product detail page. But that is not "when they are adding the product to the shopping cart." whatever you mean by that.

[quigley595]

Thanks for your reply Kelvyn.
What I mean by "adding the product........."  is that I want the customer to be able to enter free format comments at the point where they are actually adding the product to the shopping cart, ie clicking on the "Add To Cart" button.
I know there is a comment field on the overall order, but I want this one to relate to specific items.

I couldn't use the textarea custom field, because while I can key in fixed text in the custom textarea field, I want the customer to enter their own text.

I could use custom fields with dropdowns, but the problem is that again, the text is fixed.......   if it were something like colour on individual items, or if the same custom attribute (eg colour was to be applied to EVERY item on the order line, that would be no problem, but say they want to order 20 of a particular product (Product-X), , but they want 5 Red ones, 7 Blue ones and 8 Green ones....      I could put the colours into a custom dropdown field, but rather than have 3 separate lines for the SAME product on the order, eg:
Product-X      qty 5      colour Red 
Product-X      qty 7      colour Blue
Product-X      qty 8      colour Green
I wanted to have them order just one order line as below:
Product-X      qty 20    and in the comments box, they could enter "5 Red, 7 Blue and 8 Green.

I can't use the comments on the overall order, because the order may have more lines than just Product-X

Its actually a little more complicated than the above, but that describes generally what I want to do.
Hope that makes a little more sense.....   

I would be greatly indebted for any suggestions on this, as I am really hanging out for a solution.....

Cheers,
Mike

You could use a Custom Field Type: text area in the product detail page. But that is not "when they are adding the product to the shopping cart." whatever you mean by that.

[jenkinhill]

OK I see what you are trying to do. For that I would probably use Product Builder rather than rely on the shopper typing in text. See http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=102165.0

[quigley595]

thanks Kelvyn,
I will check out Product Builder.

cheers
Mike