Making attributes assigned to configurable products optional

Question

Right now when you setup a configurable product, you choose attributes to assign to that configurable product which determine how to relate simple products to it.

I have a situation where there are a lot of simple products to assign to one configurable product, however some configurable attributes need to be optional. The optional configurable attributes would just come last in the sort ordering on the configurable product page. So if the next attribute is not assigned to that associated simple product, it wouldn't show -- only those configurable attributes of those with values would show.

Answer 1

Sounds like you have a problem that can be solved in UX by showing the products in a grid rather than a confusing set of drop-down. You can also put event observers in the frontend javascript to make it so that when a drop-down only has one option, e.g. 'ONE SIZE', then you select it and hide the option. In that way you can run size/colour options on every product automatically hiding drop-downs that are not created.