Ordering CartThrob products by price when some have options

Question

I'm working on a small CartThrob site at the moment. The site uses 'points' rather than real currency.

Products are stored in the "products" channel which contains a custom field for the points value of each product. There is also an options field to handle sizes/colours etc.

I have elected to use the points field by default but if a product has options then the points field is left at 0 and the price for each option entered in the options field - I find this easier for the client to understand than have them entering price differences for options.

Now, I need to order the products by price from lowest to highest. This is simple enough where there are no options but is it possible to include those products with option pricing in this ordering?

I'm using the obvious entries tag;

{exp:channel:entries channel="products" dynamic="no" orderby="price" sort="asc"}
... product stuff ...
{/exp:channel:entries}

It would be lovely if I could do something like;

{exp:channel:entries channel="products" dynamic="no" orderby="price|options:price" sort="asc"}
... product stuff ...
{/exp:channel:entries}

I'm hoping I can weave the option products into this somehow without having to resort to setting a "base price" on each one and have the client enter price diffrences for each option.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Here are some suggestions:

1. Bite the bullet and use the pricing how CT intended. Have a base price field and use modifiers.

2. Keep the base price at 0, and use modifiers to show the total prices, like you want. But add a 'sorting price' or 'minimum' price purely for the purposes of ordering by price in your templates.

If you decide to go with option 1, you can show the total prices rather than +20 by using the arithmetic tag.

{exp:channel:entries channel="products" orderby="base_price"}
  <h1>{title}</h1>
  <h2>Options</h2>
  {product_options}
    <h3>{option_name}</h3>
    <p><b>Price:</b> {exp:cartthrob:arithmetic operator="+" num1="{base_price}" num2="{price}"}</p>
  {/product_options}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Answer 2

If you only have a small amount of products, and you're not relying on the channel:entries pagination, you might be able to do it with stash. This is intended as psuedo-code and just a starting point (I forget the exact tags for getting item option prices in CT, for instance).

{exp:stash:set_list name="my_products" parse_tags="yes" parse_conditionals="yes"}
    {exp:channel:entries channel="products"}
        {stash:item_title}{title}{/stash:item_title}
        {stash:item_summary}{summary}{/stash:item_summary}
        {stash:item_price}{if price:numeric}{price}{if:else}{your_item_options_field}{price:numeric}{/your_item_options_field}{/if}{/stash:item_price}
    {/exp:channel:entries}
{/exp:stash:set_list}

You will probably need to fiddle around with parse order stuff to get that price stash working properly. Maybe add more parse_depth to the stash tag.

Then you'd do a list with stash:get_list

{exp:stash:get_list name="my_products" orderby="item_price"}
    <li>{item_title} - {item_price}</li>
{/exp:stash:get_list}

Check the stash wiki for more on set_list and get_list https://github.com/croxton/Stash/wiki