Advanced Product Filters for Custom Fields

About the Extension

Products often have their characteristics stored in additional fields: material, weight, base colour – maintained manually or automatically from the ERP. Until now, this information has gone unused in the category listing, as filtering there is based on properties and manufacturers, not on additional fields. This extension fills precisely this gap.

Selectively enable additional fields as filters

In the configuration, you can choose which product additional fields are offered as filters. Only selected fields appear in the storefront; all others remain unaffected. The selection field performs a server-side search, ensuring that even shops with hundreds of additional fields remain clearly organised.

Three display types per field

• Drop-down with checkboxes – the familiar Shopware display, taking up minimal space in the filter bar.
• Checkboxes – a permanently expanded list for attributes that should be immediately visible.
• Range slider – a slider with two handles, including minimum and maximum input fields for numeric fields. The increment can be selected freely or is determined automatically.

In addition, for each field, you can specify its position in the filter bar, a custom label and whether the number of results is displayed.

Filters only appear where they have an effect

The selection values are generated by aggregating the products in the current listing. If a category does not contain any products with the relevant additional field, the filter will not be displayed there. There is no need to maintain any mappings between filters and categories, and there are no empty filters in categories to which the attribute does not belong.

The displayed hit counts count variants of a product only once and thus correspond to the visible tiles in the listing. For free-text fields with a very large number of different values, the number of options can be limited.

Colour names from the ERP as colour swatches

Merchandise management systems provide colours as free text, not as hex codes: alongside black is black, alongside marketing names such as mocha latte, multi-colour values such as black/silver and abbreviations such as sapphire blue/midnight blue/silver. If you enable colour display for a field, a colour swatch appears before each value; for multi-colour values, it is segmented.

The resolution process takes place in three stages: first, your assignment in the relevant additional field; then a colour lexicon provided with the system, containing over a hundred German and English colour names, which you can expand, amend or shorten as you wish; and finally, the breakdown of multi-part values. Details regarding the surface finish, such as patent or matt, are skipped during this process. If a value cannot be resolved, it appears without a colour rather than with an incorrect one.

The assignment editor reads the values that actually appear in your products. New colours from the ERP system appear there automatically. A filter for values that have not yet been assigned and a button to apply all suggestions keep maintenance to a minimum, even with a large number of colours. Up to three hex codes and a custom display label are possible per value.

Set-up

1. Prepare additional field: under Settings › Additional fields, create a set, assign the ‘Product’ entity to it, and maintain the values for the products.
2. Open configuration: Extensions › My Extensions › Configure.
3. On the ‘Additional Fields’ tab, select the desired fields. For each field, set the display, position, number of hits and, optionally, a custom label. Changes are saved immediately.
4. For colour fields, tick ‘Show colour area’ and use ‘Edit colour mapping’ to assign Hex codes to the existing values. ‘Apply suggestions’ fills in everything already recognised by the colour dictionary.
5. Optionally, add your own colour names to the colour dictionary on the tab of the same name.
6. Access the category in Storefront: the filter appears in the filter bar as soon as matching products are available.

Supported field types

Text fields, single- and multi-select fields, Yes/No fields, as well as whole numbers and decimal numbers. The range slider is available for numeric fields. Additional fields of the types JSON, Price and HTML are skipped.

General settings

• Main switch to activate the filters; can be set per sales channel.
• Only display filters if matching products are available in the category.
• Maximum number of filter options per filter.

Technical notes

The filters are integrated via the standard Shopware extension points for product listings and work in both category listings and the search function. Active filters appear as usual as removable buttons above the listing. Cached listings are automatically refreshed when the configuration is changed. If Elasticsearch is used, the additional fields utilised must be included in the product mapping.