Adding a product attribute with values and mark one value as default
tl;dr: For select attributes this cannot be declared directly in the initial addAttribute()
call; two calls are required.
In order to set the default value, eav_attribute.default
must be set with the primary key value from the eav_attribute_option
table At a high level the need for two calls is apparent by looking at the flow and function of the addAttribute()
and addAttributeOption()
methods:
- Prepare values
- Insert/update into the
eav_attribute
table - Insert/update set/group
- Call
addAttributeOption()
to insert/update option values
The only hope then would be that addAttributeOption()
will be able to update the eav_attribute
record. However, there is no code which does this. The only tables accessed by this method are eav_attribute_option
and eav_attribute_option_value
.
It is therefore necessary to call getAttribute()
after the initial addAttribute()
call, grab the attribute option ID and then call updateAttribute()
.
Edit:
After the earlier answer I couldn't help but verify my answer against the existing code; after all, for catalog_product
entities we have a nice MVC flow to follow thanks to the attribute CRUD GUI. And there it was, in \Mage_Adminhtml_Catalog_Product_AttributeController::saveAction()
, that I saw the attribute model being set with the following data just before being saved:
Note that the attribute's default
value has references to the value
keys. Do a little digging and you end up at \Mage_Eav_Model_Resource_Entity_Attribute::_saveOption()
, which is called from this resource's _afterSave()
method - just as you'd expect given that we need to have an eav_attribute
record to update. You can even see how multiselect and select defaults are handled in the same place, just before the final update:
$bind = array('default_value' => implode(',', $attributeDefaultValue));
$where = array('attribute_id =?' => $object->getId());
$adapter->update($this->getMainTable(), $bind, $where);
So, another alternative is to work directly with the resource model.