I am currently working for large retailer's Magento project. Retailer has two colour attributes. One is for primary colour and second one is for supplier colour which is actually acts as separate sku (simple) on configurable product view page.
We have created two attributes. primary_colour which is filterable, and supplier_colour which is configurable.
It is hard for client to manage huge number of supplier colours. So they want to map their primary colour attributes with supplier colour attributes. E.g. blue maps to Navy Blue and Sky Blue
Challenge 1: Now client want to show colour swatches for both attributes however want to show same swatch for supplier_colour as primary colour one. As they dont want to create hundreds of swatches for different supplier colours which are same but named differently by different suppliers
Challenge 2: When customer choose pimary colour from LHS layered navigation, then configurable product change its image to corresponding mapped supplier colour (It is quite easy if we use same configurable attribute (supplier colour) in layered navigation. However we have two separate attributes)
I am wondering if someone shed some light on this particular scenario. What is the best approach to achieve it.