How to model products / prices for user configurable products

[Martin Grotzke]

Hi,

I'm evaluating OFBiz for an online shop that shall also provide plissees
(s.th. like http://plissees.com/).

For the plissee configuration we want to create/integrate a custom
product configurator, and I'm wondering how the product data, prices and
the users product configuration would be represented in the existing
OFBiz structures (db, object model) and how this would be integrated in
the cart / checkout process / order confirmation.

Here are some more details...

We have prices in some excel sheet like this:
producttype,pricegroup,carriers,minwidth,maxwidth,minheight,maxheight,price

e.g.
producttype: vs2
pricegroup: 1
carriers: 4
minwidth: 1000
maxwidth: 1100
minheight: 1600
maxheight: 1700
price: 90

There are ~50.000 lines / prices (many for a single producttype,
pricegroup and carriers and with changing width/height/price data).

The workflow in the custom product configurator includes these steps:
The user selects the product type, specifies width/height, selects the
plissee color and material (which determines the pricegroup), and as
well the track color. See e.g.
http://www.raumtextilienshop.de/plissee/plissee-konfigurator.asp or here
http://plissees.com/index.php?p=Plissees_GeradeFormen to get an idea how
it might look like.

Our product configurator then would map this selection to one of the
stored prices (some kind of product?) to determine the price.
The users product configuration shall be displayed in the shopping cart
/ checkout process / order confirmation.

I read https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBENDUSER/Products
but I still don't see what would be the best solution for our case.

The actual questions that I have/see:
- How would our existing prices from the excel sheet be represented in
OFBiz?
- What kind of products would we manage?
- How is the users product configuration associated with a order item
and how is it represented in the shopping cart / checkout / order
confirmation.
- As the product configurator shall provide a selection of plissee color
/ material (like here
http://plissees.com/?step=1&ProdukteigenschaftsId=1&Stoffart=153 or here
http://www.raumtextilienshop.de/plissee/plissee-konfigurator.asp) would
these be represented as products (what kind of?) itself with properties
like color, quality, material, lighttransmission etc.?
- Is there any other documentation I should read to get a better
understanding of all this?

I'd be happy to get some advice to see if/how we can achieve this with
OFBiz.

TIA && cheers,
Martin