Calculate product options based on option groups and options

Question

I am writing an e-commerce site and need a good way to calculate product variations. There are products on the site, products can have many groups of options, groups of options can have many options.

So, the Tshirt product has 3 groups of options and options:

Size : Small, Medium, Large,

Color : Red, Blue, Yellow, Black,

Material : Cotton, Nylon,

which creates: little red cotton, little red nylon, little blue cotton, little blue nylon, ... so on and so forth.

I know that the script works, but also that it can be optimized. Can anyone provide a better working example? It should also be possible with recursion ... but I'm in a mental block.

if(count($option_groups) > 1) { // start the variants up foreach($option_groups[0]->get_options() as $option) { $variants[] = array($option); } // go through every other option group to make combos for($x = 1; $x < count($option_groups); $x++) { $combos = array(); foreach($variants as $variant) { $new = array(); foreach($option_groups[$x]->get_options() as $option) { $tmp = $variant; $tmp[] = $option; $new[] = $tmp; } $combos[] = $new; } $variants = array(); foreach($combos as $combo) { foreach($combo as $tmp) { $variants[] = $tmp; } } } } 

This is not very time sensitive, but I would like to have a more convenient code number, which is pretty rude.

Also this problem (I feel that this is not the original problem, many carts do it) have a name? I have not dealt with the Google issue for this issue.

EDIT This is what I came to, based on a profitphp solution, but supporting my objects instead of giving me options for one option, combined as a string. All thanks Profitphp!

 private function _possible_combos($groups, $prefix = array()) { $result = array(); $group = array_shift($groups); foreach($group->get_options() as $selected) { if($groups) { $tmp = $prefix; $tmp[] = $selected; $result = array_merge($result, $this->_possible_combos($groups, $tmp)); } else { $tmp = $prefix; $tmp[] = $selected; $result[] = $tmp; } } return $result; } 

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

 <? $data[]=array('shirt'); $data[]=array('red','yellow','black'); $data[]=array('small','medium','large'); $combos=possible_combos($data); //calculate all the possible comobos creatable from a given choices array function possible_combos($groups, $prefix='') { $result = array(); $group = array_shift($groups); foreach($group as $selected) { if($groups) { $result = array_merge($result, possible_combos($groups, $prefix . $selected. ' ')); } else { $result[] = $prefix . $selected; } } return $result; } echo count($combos) . "\n"; print_r($combos); 

Tested: http://www.ideone.com/NZE5S

Answer 2

If this is an e-commerce site, my hunch is that your parameter groups are already in the SQL database, so why not just let SQL do the combinations for you.

 SELECT Size.Name, Color.Name, Material.Name FROM Size, Color, Material 

But what if you had all your parameters in one table with a foreign key in the group in which it was ...

 SELECT r1.Name, r2.Name, r3.Name FROM Options r1, Options r2, Options r3 WHERE r1.GroupID = 1 -- id for Size AND r2.GroupID = 2 -- id for Color AND r3.GroupID = 3 -- id for Material 

Once you have an array containing the group identifiers generating the above SQL statement, it is trivial (just a concatenation of several lines).