Adding Downloadable Products to Grouped Products or Bundled Products

Question

I am a developer working on a Magento site where it is a requirement that a Downloadable Product is included in a Grouped Product (or, failing that, a Bundled Product).

I understand that by default Magento does not allow this, I have tried adding a Downloadable product in the admin panel and I cannot group it with other products. Is there any way I can override this to allow Downloadable Products to be added to Grouped Products or Bundled Products.

Ideally a solution to work with Grouped Products would be the best if that is possible.

I have found this thread on the Magento forums http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/27120/ but on the post by shawnmck I am not sure what he means by the flag 'required_options'.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you. Please let me know if any further information is required. I am working with Magento Community 1.7.0.2.

Answer 1

By looking at http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/27120/ and following shawnmck's instructions I managed to find a solution to my problem, hopefully this might help someone else.

When you create Downloadable Products and set "Links can be purchased separately" to "Yes" when you create the product, this sets the required_fields field in the database (in catalog_product_entity table) to 1 for that product. For Simple/Downloadable products to be able to be added to a Grouped Product, their value for required_fields must be 0. The "Links can be purchased separately" must then be set as "No" from the point at which the product is created (and never changed to "Yes"). If you change it to "Yes" and then back to "No" the required_fields will be set to 1 and will not change back to 0, even if you switch back to "No" (I think this may be a small Magento bug).

The only way then that I have found to change required_fields from 1 to 0 manually once the product has been created is to follow shawnmck's steps: in the "Custom Options" tab, add a Custom Option as required, Save, then change the option to Not Required, Save, then delete the option altogether, then Save. As you can see this is a bit of an effort so I would suggest making sure "Links can be purchased separately" is set to "No" from the start!

Answer 2

I have just tested in a stock magento 1.7.0.2, and created a downloadable product. I made sure the 'Links can be purchased separately' is set to 'NO'

I then created a test grouped product, and could add the downloadable product fine as an option. Thus it is possible, out the box, to link downloadable to grouped.

So the question is, why can't you....

Lets try some stuff, and see if we can get to the bottom of your issue :)

Can you explain what happens if you try? Have you tried creating a basic/new downloadable, which has onl the stock/default attributes assigned to it, and see if that works.

It is very possible one of your attributes is the issue.