Magento: Add a "fake" product to cart/quote

I understand how to programmatically create a product and also add to cart. I know this might sound dumb but is it is possible to genera开发者_开发知识库te a product on the fly and add that to the cart/quote but never actually save it in the database.

We want to create a made to order interface and I was thinking at the end it could add a bundle product with all the selections but that bundle product wouldn't actually exist in the backend.

I figured as long as you can make sure the quote and order has what it needs in terms of the product it would be ok, but obviously there is probably a lot that is tied to looking up stuff in the db on a specific sku or ID. I know that if you delete a product and then look at an order in the admin that causes issues, at least it did for this one scenario I was dealing with.

I was thinking of creating a giant bundle product that had like 6 different bundle items and each item could potentially have like 500 products and then based on what the user selects I programmatically add the bundle to cart. But then I wasn't sure if there would be a negative affect with having a gigantic bundle product like that as well.

UPDATE: I don't think this will work, obviously there are a lot of information tied to the product in the database and we setup a test and right away we get an error for $item->getProduct(). We are moving forward with creating a giant bundle product and also the generic product with adding custom options on the fly, which Anda pointed out below. Any other suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure that clockworkgeek's approach is going to work. On every page load, Magento loads the items from the cart to make sure that they are still valid (in-stock, prices correct, etc), and amends the cart to reflect those values. My understanding of the system in the past has been that a product in the cart needs to have a corresponding database value to survive this process.

The "giant bundle product" approach is a pain, but in the past has been the best approach I have found. Attempting to change the values of the product (such as price or attributes) will be overridden by the cart checks, so you need a product w/ maximal flexibility, such as an overly-customized bundle product or configurable product.

Hope that helps!

Thanks, Joe

Why not create a generic product in db and then set the product customization as custom options (additional_options) on the fly depending on the user selection. You can add custom options to the product (actually to the quote item) without having to save them in the database. I did this once for a website that sells glasses with prescription. The prescription was added as an option.

You can programmatically create Mage_Sales_Model_Quote_Items and add them to the cart. You've noticed it needs a product to match it's product ID but it needn't be a useful one. It could be a blank, disabled product, also created in code. All that's needed is a stub.
The necessary stuff for the cart is stored in the quote item - fields like name, value and quantity. Those fields are then copied directly to the order without using a product.

Mage::getModel('catalog/product') 

creates a new product. you can add it to a cart, by doing something like this:

$cart = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart');
$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
               ->setStoreId($storeid)
               ->setTypeId($type_id)
               ->setQty($quantyty)
               ->setWhatAttributYouWant($attribute);
$cart->addProduct($product);

product attributes you can find in the DB in tables that start like catalog_product_... or take an already created product, and see what attributes it has in the _data array (with debugger or just print_r($product->getData))