Linking related products with a Custom field?

[Weavy]

Hi

Fairly new to Virtuemart, can find my way around component code but I'm no programmer.  Running version 3.8.4 and Joomla 3.9.20.

I'm setting up a printer's website which will have thousands of child products.  My first issue is Virtuemart seems to become very slow at refreshing the custom fields page when you have above 120 child products per product, so I'm trying to stay under that amount so the backend keeps functioning okay.

However,  I really need to have 1000+ child products per product!

A typical product like 'business cards' has the following custom fields: Qty (9 options), Sides (2 options), Paper Weight (6 options) - This creates 107 children.

But I also need paper size (6 options) and paper type (5 options).

So currently I have separated the paper size into separate products with children.

i.e Paper Size products

A7 - Parent and 107 children
A6 - Parent and 107 children
A5 - Parent and 107 children
A4 - Parent and 107 children
A3 - Parent and 107 children

So ideally I now need a custom field on the product page that links the parent products in a dropdown menu or buttons so the user can select the paper size first and goto the correct paper size and child products.

Is this possible somehow or is there an extension that might do this or can Virtumart already handle 1000+ children and I'm doing something wrong?

Any help and guidance would be appreciated.

[PRO]

why do you need them as childs?

you are not stocking inventory.

you could maybe use
https://breakdesigns.net/extensions/joomla/product-builder


You could also use category as parent

[Weavy]

Thanks for your quick reply.

As I mentioned I'm new to VirtueMart and have only created simple e-commerce before this and detailed documentation seems limited for this great component.

From your experience, how would you go about setting it up the products?  I just created a product and added the various multi-variants as child products.  I didn't know there was an alternative way, can you provide some more detail, please?

I'll take a look at the product builder, thanks.

I don't like the category page format for the parent, I really wanted it all to function from dropdown menu multi-variants which looks much slicker, smarter.