How do I modify the Magento Search to check child skus?

Currently, the site search will search all of the skus of the items marked as being visible in search. This is all well and good.

The problem arises when the customer knows a sku of the individual child item. So, let's say a product comes in both a 20 foot and 25 foot variation. We would put those into a configurable product and have a single product page where a customer could then choose which of those two lengths.

What happens is, a customer invariably knows that the sku of the 20 ft variation is RDB-20, while the other is RDB-25. A search for RDB-25 then, comes back with no results since the simple product is not visible in search - it doesn't realize there is a match.

How do I get the search to search an item with visibility "Not Visible Individually", when it's parent is visible in search?

The desired effect 开发者_JAVA技巧is that, if a child SKU is searched for, the parent should show up in the results.

There really is no good way of doing it without extending the default search, but at that point you might as well look for other options.

Here's a workaround that might be doable depending on how you manage your products and it worked for me until I moved on from the default search.

Rather than altering the search, try adding an attribute to all products and make it hidden concatenating all the skus into this field. The search should find the text attribute and show the configurable.

Its a bit of a workaround but works for me.

This is untested, but I did a bit of perusing in our attributes and I think I found something that might help.

Currently since our child products don't show up in our search, we have the parent populate with the children product's attributes.

However, things like brand, taxable amount, description, populate for every child product while our SKU does not.

The only difference I can see between the two attributes is under manage attributes -> click on attribute -> and then under properties go to frontend properties and select

• Use In Search Results Layered Navigation: YES
• Used in Product Listing: YES
• Use In Layered Navigation: Filterable (with results)

I'm not sure which of these do what, but in the population of the fulltext search data table, somewhere it is being told to populate for the children and I believe that the admin panel is where.

I hope this helps!