Get child product short description based on attribute selected on parent product

Question

I am looking to update the short description when the user selects different items in the dropdown of a configurable product.

What I am struggling to wrap my head around is how I would get the short description.

So on the frontend I have the dropdown which has the attributes for example IDs 257-259, I then have products assigned to these attributes, which are then assigned to the configurable product.

From this ID and the Configurable product ID how would I go about getting the simple product short description and assign it in an array to the attribute ID?

I can get a list of the simple product IDs with the following:

$ids = Mage::getResourceSingleton('catalog/product_type_configurable')->getChildrenIds($_product->getId());

I am already extending getJsonConfig in order to add some price variations to my page, I'd like to add the short description into the JS spConfig - I can do the following to spConfig:

'shortDescription' => $currentProduct->getShortDescription(),

But this is the parent product and not the simple one. I am looping through the options and I add the attribute ID and label to my array, but I don't know how to get X product with Y attribute that is from Z configurable.

Answer 1

In the end I achieved this in my getJsonConfig override class using:

$ids = Mage::getResourceSingleton('catalog/product_type_configurable')->getChildrenIds($currentProduct->getId());

$info['options'][$i] = array(
    'id'        => $value['value_index'],
    'label'     => $value['label'],
    'price'     => $configurablePrice,
    'oldPrice'  => (isset($simplePrices['old']) ? $simplePrices['old'] : 0),
    'products'  => $productsIndex,
);

foreach($ids[0] as $id){

    $_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($id);

    if(in_array($_product->getId(),$productsIndex)){
        $info['options'][$i]['short_description'] = $_product->getShortDescription();
    }
}