Trying to delete a configurable product attribute and it comes up with a "This attribute is used in configurable products." Error.
The product associated with this attribute is now disabled but we don't really want to delete it if we can help it (we want to keep a record of this for customers). We need to delete these as we have almost 200 configurable attributes like this. This becomes really slow with 2 stores and 300+ attributes when loading a product (Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($id) // all attributes loaded).
I was wondering if there is there away to either stop Magento from loading all configurable product attributes not associated with the product when load() is called or reduce the number of configurable attributes we have without deleting the products. (Perhaps we could create a single dummy attribute to replace all the configurable product attribute that we don't use) ?
Any ideas?
Thanks in Advance,
eav_attribute
and then heavily test this. I don't think this will work and there will be errors you don't find while testing. But this is the dark path you can go.