Magento associated products will not show up

Question

I would like my product to have various sizes and colors. Via the "Associated Products" section of my configurable product, I added 5 products of varying colors and sizes. e.g.

• None of these products show up as linked to the configurable product under neither the "Associated Products" tab nor in the database tables shop_catalog_product_relation or shop_catalog_product_super_link
• The configurable products says it's out of stock

I've tried:

• After adding the associated products, I made sure to click the main Save button to save the parent product's settings
• Setting parent product's "Manage Stock" to No and Yes. Makes no difference.
• I've tried manually inserting the relationship into the shop_catalog_product_relation table
• I've triple checked all quantities and "enabled"ness of the child products.
• There's nothing in the exception log.
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/2493774/193244

Answer 1

After taking a deep dive into the Magento core code, I found the issue. I had 2 attributes for my products: color and size. The size and color attributes were only applied to "configurable products" not "simple products". Magento was requiring the associated "simple products" to have a color and size. When it found they didn't have them, it filtered them out - hence the "out of stock". What's extra confusing is why Magento was letting me choose color and size when creating associated products even though they weren't allowed to have these attributes.

Lesson: Make sure product attributes are applied to "simple products" in the Manage Attributes section of the admin.