Creating configurable product programmatically

I'm trying to create configurable products programmatically in Magento 1.5.1.

I understand I need first to create simple related products, what I did. Now I manage to associate these simple products to make a configurable one.

Here is the critical part...

I keep the ids and some of the attributes values in an array, so I can later make my configurable product, but some of them are missing, I don't know which method to call. I found this entry in Magento Wiki, that helped me and seems to fit my needs.

However, at the end the author is setting two things :

$product->setConfigurableProductsData($data);
$product->setConfigurableAttributesData($data);

and the values in the arrays have been taken in the admin page source using Firebug....and then translated into PHP arrays (array example for the first call) :

"I’ve harcoded the values for my associated products and attribute data. You can get attribute data by viewing the source through the admin interface and using Firebug for Firefox."

$data = array('5791'=>array('0'=>array('attribute_id'=>'491', // I already got this
                                       'label'=>'vhs',        // this too
                                       'value_index'=>'5',    // but what is value_index ?
                                       'is_percent'=>0,
                                       '开发者_如何学JAVApricing_value'=>'')),
              '5792'=>array('0'=>array('attribute_id'=>'491',
                                       'label'=>'dvd',
                                       'value_index'=>'6',
                                       'is_percent'=>0,
                                       'pricing_value'=>'')));

My question is : is there a way to retrieve these values without using Firebug (which in my script won't help me a lot !), but programmatically. I already found a way to retrieve attribute values, labels, etc... using its code, but one field I don't know is value_index.

I guess this may be the option position in an option list, but not sure. Also if someone knows a good/better way to create a configurable product in Magento, please tell me.

Any help is welcome thank you.

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It seems you're asking where to retrieve the value_index value where you already have the label. Here's what I had: I didn't test this on 1.5x.

function get_attribute_id($option, $type) {
   $attributeId      = Mage::getResourceModel('eav/entity_attribute')->getIdByCode('catalog_product', $type);
   $attribute        = Mage::getModel('catalog/resource_eav_attribute')->load($attributeId);
   $attributeOptions = $attribute->getSource()->getAllOptions();

   foreach ($attributeOptions as $opts_arr) {
       if (strtoupper($opts_arr['label']) == strtoupper($option)) {
          return $opts_arr['value'];
       }
    }
    return FALSE;
}

$value_index = get_attribute_id('vhs', 'media_format');

No one else seemed to mention the easiest way to figure out what the value_index of vhs is: In the backend, under Catalog > Manage > media_format > Manage Label/Options Inspect the source of the individual form inputs. Where you have 'vhs' you should have an input named option[value][6]

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As far as I understand your question, there are two options: a) create simple products by script, put the generated id's in an array and create the configurables using the ids or b) read the id's from the admin and put them in your script. Since programming is about automation I'd definately go for option a.