How To Make The Associations In The Database

You can import representing products just like any other ordinary products and after they are imported you can create a script which "links" corresponding representing products together. Our extension doesn't provide any out-of-the-box import script for linking represented products.

Links are stored in EAV format in catalog_product_link and related tables. Below is demonstration from our demo.

Representing products in Admin Panel look like this:

In database, the information from this grid is stored in several tables. First of all in catalog_product_link table products IDS of related products are stored:

Columns described:

• product_id – ID of main product
• linked_product_id – ID of representing (child product)
• link_type_id – 6 means "representing product relationship". It is always the same number, most often 6. Exact number can be found in catalog_product_link_type table.

Then please check catalog_product_link_attribute table. You won't need to import anything into it, but there are important IDs of link attributes and in which table attribute is stored:

As you can see 5 attributes are stored for each representing product link:

• m_parts – value from "Parts" column in the Admin Panel grid
• m_unit – value from "Unit of measure" column in the Admin Panel grid
• m_External_id – reserved
• position – value from "Position" column in the Admin Panel grid
• m_pack_qty – value from "Pack Qty" column in the Admin Panel grid

• data_type columns states in which table each attribute is stored. You can see that there are 3 additional tables used. Below these tables are listed and data for our sample product is also provided:

  1) catalog_product_link_decimal:

  

  2) catalog_product_link_varchar:

  

  3) catalog_product_link_int: