Enterprise Target Rule - Attribute Values Must Have Store ID of 0 (zero)

Question

A Magento EE 1.14.0.1 site I'm working on was having problem with target rules. The rule would be something very simple, like this:

Products to Match:
If ALL of these conditions are TRUE:
Category is 10

Products to Display:
If ALL of these conditions are TRUE:
Product Collection contains Matched Product Collection

Now "Collection" is a custom attribute that we created (attribute code is collections.) It's a multiselect, with a scope of "Store View". We also imported the nearly 1000 options for that attribute, and over 10,000 attribute-to-product values. When we imported these values, we set the store_id to 1.

I should note that we only have one website (ID: 1) one store group (ID: 1) and one store view (ID: 1) so setting the store_id to 1 in catalog_product_entity_value seemed okay.

We noticed that the subselect that the Target Rule module creates has store_id = 0 in it though, and that no products ever matched based on this collections attribute. It wasn't until we changed all of the values in catalog_product_entity_value to have store_id = 0 that this Target Rule started working.

There isn't even a means to select a store view in the admin because we only have one on the site, and there are thousands of attribute values in catalog_product_entity_value with a store_id of 1, so why must I set this particular attribute to 0 to get it to work?

Answer 1

I heard back from Magento, and they told us:

Magento should always have the value for store_id = 0, because it is for admin store.

If the merchant has more than 1 store and wants to set some specific attribute value for this store, Magento will add new record with a value for this attribute and set store_id depending on this store.

That makes sense, and I plan to adjust any and all custom import code accordingly, as I can't be sure what other Magento functions expect this.