advanced search with configurable product in Magento

Question

I have a clothing e-commerce website. I created color and size attributes and used them with configurable products. The configurable products have at least two associated products and those associated products have color and size options.

When I use advanced search to search items with a specified size attribute, nothing shows up on the result page. I guess it is because associated products' visibility is set to "Nowhere".

How do fix this?

Answer 1

Configurable products should be indexed with the attributes of their associated products, regardless of the visibility of those products.

I'd suggest checking that the configurable products don't have visibility set to include them in search results. Also, refreshing the search index may fix the problem.

Answer 2

Above answer might suffice in some cases. I however experienced same problem as 'Moon' indicated in this thread, even though all visibility settings where correct for the configurable product (visibility 'catalog and search') and the attributes (show in advanced search 'yes').

E.g. a configurable product consisting of articles in size range 36 to 42 did only show size 36 in search results. Sizes 38 - 42 did not give any search result even though 'active', 'visible', 'in stock' etc..

I set up the associated products within the configurable products using the 'quick create option'

I managed to solve the issue as follows: Setting the visibility of ONE associated product - one simple product within a configurable product - from 'not visible individually' to 'search' , saving the item and then changing back from visibility 'search' to 'not visible individually' solved the problem for ALL productvariations (thus all simple products) within the configurable products.

So changing the above for associated product size 38, suddenly revealed search results for all sizes,

It seems to be that the 'flag' in the table which should show the result in advanced search is not set correctly in first instance but only after a 're-edit'as explained above. I will dig into this further - when time allows ;-) . Don't know yet whether this is a Magento bug or is related to database or server settings.

Hope this will help someone who faces same situation.

Post-remark (edit):re-indexing ALL indexes not just the one that Magento advises to re-index might help too in this case.