Exclude Shipping Methods by Product (Variant) Attribute

Previously in this blog Exclude Shipping Methods by Specification Attribute we discussed checking a Product Specification Attribute.  The scenario was that if a product required assembly, that it could not be picked up in the store.

In this blog, we'll look at how to examine a Product Attribute.  (Product Attributes are actually Product Variant Attributes).    For example, let's say our "Assembled" attribute is something the customer chooses at the time of adding an item to a cart; they can choose a value of "Yes", or "No".   NopCommerce stores customer attribute choices in the shopping cart item's AttributeXml field.  However, we don't have to parse the XML - this field is a string, and we can just look for the correct <Value> tag in the string using the Contains() function.  Here's what a typical AttributeXml looks like for a product variant having only a single attribute  (I've added spacing and linefeeds for readability):

<Attributes>
     <ProductVariantAttribute ID="1">
         <ProductVariantAttributeValue><Value>1</Value></ProductVariantAttributeValue>
     </ProductVariantAttribute>
</Attributes>

It's that <ProductVariantAttributeValue><Value>1</Value> we are looking for - that number "1" in the value tag is the unique Id of the attribute value in the database table (just <Value>1</Value> would be enough, but I'll also include the parent tag to make it clear)

We'll use the same scenatio we did last time - Always offer Fedex, and only offer In-Store pickup if item does NOT require assembly (the leading "!" is the NOT operator).  Here we go...

Yep, that's it!  You will, however, have to find the correct Value Id.  To do that, either check in the database - e.g:

or, you can use Shipping Director to just dump out the AttributeXml to examine.  Set up this record:

Then, put an item with desired selection in the cart and Estimate Shipping.