magento configurable product behaviour

Question

I am having the following issue with my magento, custom unfortunately, development. The scenario is that the client wants the price of a configurable product to be calculated using a specific formula that involves multiplications, while magento has only sums. for example one of the attributes is "material" and the other one is number of occurrences so these two have to be multiplied.

I have programmed and created through scripting new products for every possible combination and assigned them to a configurable. But when I go to "add to cart" at the end the price that I have is not the one of the final product, but the one magento calculates.

Has any one been across a similar scenario? Any possible solutions?

Because I might have been to abstract, I will also write my usage example:

The store is about selling jewellery.

Attribute: stone material

Attribute: number of stones

Price: Base Value + (number of stones)x(price of stone material)

Answer 1

I have a strong suspicion that you are changing the price as the item goes into the cart. Is that right? Magento, for some reason which is probably justifiable but not less irritating, will recalculate the price of the item on every page load.

This means that, effectively, you must change the implementation so that the product's internal price calculation is modified to your needs, or the price will never stick.

Hope that helps.

Thanks! Joe