eCommerce - Flexible Attributes (customisation preferences)

Some products may allow the customer to customise the product, e.g. by adding a custom message to be engraved on the product, or having the product cut to custom dimensions with no limits (as a traditional attribute might have).

Could we create a flexible attribute which could be added to a product where the user defines a custom value when it is added, and this value is carried into the cart / order etc. This flexible attribute would have no traditional options, but may have validation rules or field type e.g. string with max-length 50 characters or number with min and max values between 10 - 60. This validation could possibly not need to be defined in Siteglide, but could simply be defined in Cart HTML- that’s a decision to be made which is best / easiest.

Currently the custom code workaround for this is to dynamically create the attributes needed if they do not yet exist using custom API calls, but a more developer-friendly option would be useful.

A further use-case for this might be when purchasing courses, to be able to select a date value for a flexible attribute, so in the same basket you could have 1 course for date a and two courses for date b, without having to define those options beforehand.

Naturally, it will not be possible to store inventory for these kinds of attributes, certainly not at first. They could have a price e.g. pen costs £10 but engraved pen costs £5 extra, whatever the message.