Magento: Attribute with thousands of values/options

Question

I'm creating a Book store in Magento and am having trouble figuring out the best way to handle the Authors of a Book (which would be the product).

What I currently have is an Attribute called "authors" which is multi-select and a thousand [test] values. It's still manageable but does get a little slow when editing a product. Also, when adding an option/value to the authors attribute itself, a huge list is rendered in the HTML making this an inefficient solution.

• Is there another approach I should take?
• Is it possible to create an Author object (entity type?) which is associated to a product through a join table? If yes, can someone give me an explanation about how that is done or point me to some good documentation?
• If I'd take the Author object approach, could that still be used in the layered navigation?
• How would I show the list of all books for a single author?

Thanks in advance!

PS: I am aware of extensions like Improved Navigation but AFAIK it adds something like attributes to attributes themselves which is not what I'm looking for.

For Googlers: The same would apply for Artists of a music site or manufacturers.

Answer 1

If you create an author entity type, you'll just increase your work trying to add it to layered navigation, and I don't see a reason why it would be faster.

Your approach seems the best fit to the problem, given the way Magento is set up. How are you going to display 1,000 (which presumably pales in comparison to the actual list) authors in layered navigation?

Depending on the requirements, you could go the route of denormalizing the field and accepting text for it. That would still allow you to display it, search based on it, etc, but would eliminate the need to render every possible artist to manipulate the list. You could add a little code around selecting the proper artist (basically add an AJAX autocomplete to the backend field) to minimize typos as well.

Alternatively, you could write a simple utility to add a new artist to the system without some of the overhead of Magento's loading the list. To be honest, though, it seems that the lag that this has the potential to create on the frontend will probably outweigh the backend trouble.

Hope that helps!

Thanks, Joe