Can someone sanity check this for me please!

[insightcreative]

Hi all

Ok, I have a site with 500 parent products.  Each parent product has a number of children so I have around 3800 products in total.  I installed VM by installing the component and the the AIO.

Each child has its own SKU and, using custom fields and stockable variants, denotes a variation of the parent product based on size and colour.

So, product 12345 is a jacket.  12345100 is a Red/36

Example: http://www.animouk.com/animo/spring-summer2013/l-jackets/lasal-detail

Now, I've used a CSV import tool to do MOST of the work in as much as it's imported all the products with their children.

What I then have to do is go into the parent where I go to custom fields and add "Size and Colour" which is the custom field that I added with all the values.  This then gives me the right number of combinations based on the children for that product.  Each one has 2 dropdowns - one for colour and one for size.  I set these according to the SKU of each one and save it.

On the front end, I select a colour and it changes the available sizes according to the stock level.

Now for the tricky bit...

I've paid a company $600 to 'import' all the bits that I'm doing manually.  From what I can see, there is a table called virtuemart_customfields.  Each row in this table links to a product.  One of the columns is custom_param.  Each product that I've fixed manually has something like this:

{"child":{"862":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Bianco","selectoptions2":"52","custom_price":""},"857":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ischia","selectoptions2":"50","custom_price":""},"858":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ischia","selectoptions2":"52","custom_price":""},"859":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Bianco","selectoptions2":"46","custom_price":""},"860":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Bianco","selectoptions2":"50","custom_price":""},"861":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Bianco","selectoptions2":"48","custom_price":""},"843":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Bianco","selectoptions2":"56","custom_price":""},"844":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ombra","selectoptions2":"46","custom_price":""},"845":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ischia","selectoptions2":"46","custom_price":""},"846":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ischia","selectoptions2":"54","custom_price":""},"847":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Hazar","selectoptions2":"46","custom_price":""},"848":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Hazar","selectoptions2":"48","custom_price":""},"849":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Hazar","selectoptions2":"50","custom_price":""},"850":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Hazar","selectoptions2":"52","custom_price":""},"851":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Hazar","selectoptions2":"54","custom_price":""},"852":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ombra","selectoptions2":"50","custom_price":""},"853":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ombra","selectoptions2":"52","custom_price":""},"854":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Bianco","selectoptions2":"54","custom_price":""},"855":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ombra","selectoptions2":"48","custom_price":""},"856":{"is_variant":"1","selectoptions1":"Ischia","selectoptions2":"48","custom_price":""}}}

So, for this example, the product id is 74.

What I wanted the company I've paid to do is go through a CSV file and create a row for each product with the children like the above example.

After 5 or 6 weeks they're telling me that what I seem to have achieved manually can't be done without a lot of customisation on the back end and front end with new tables and all sorts of stuff.

I haven't done anything more than is possible by a trained child.  No scripting, no changes to the MySQL structure, nothing.

I don't understand why they're saying that all the additional work is required.

I'm actually working through the 500 odd parent products manually - something I wish I'd done weeks ago when I was told this was a 5 day job!

So, have I got up in the night and made lots of changes to the structure of the VM tables?

Am I missing something?  Because this is driving me insane.

Regards
Andy