Redirect Simple Products to their Configurable Parent with Attributes Pre-selected in Magento 2

About two years ago I wrote a tutorial on how to redirect simple products to their configurable parents with pre-selected attributes in Magento 1.9.x. Shortly after that Magento 2 was released and I’ve received some requests on how to do the same in the new version.

In this post I will explain to you how to build a module that will redirect simple products to their configurable parent product with automatically pre-selected configurable attributes.

[Update June 18th, 2020] Due to many comments that the code in this tutorial doesn’t work anymore, I’ve tested it with Magento 2.3.5-p1 and can verify that it still works.

If it doesn’t work, then another module must be messing with your configuration.

Don’t feel like doing the work? Download the extension from Github. Feel free to fork its repository and add your own features!

Building a Basic Magento 2 Module

First we need to create the basic files and folders necessary for the module to be recognized by Magento 2.

1. Create the file /app/code/DaanvdB/RedirectSimpleProducts/registration.php and add the following snippet of code to it:
   

   	<?php
   	\Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar::register(
   	\Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar::MODULE,
   	'DaanvdB_RedirectSimpleProducts',
   	__DIR__
   	);

   view raw registration.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub
2. Create the file /app/code/DaanvdB/RedirectSimpleProducts/etc/module.xml and add the following code to it:
   

   	<?xml version="1.0"?>
   	<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:Module/etc/module.xsd">
   	<module name="DaanvdB_RedirectSimpleProducts" setup_version="1.0.0" />
   	</config>

   view raw module.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Run php bin/magento setup:upgrade from your terminal so Magento 2 will update and add your new module to its configuration.

Redirecting Simple Products to their Configurable Parent using an Observer

In order to redirect simple products to their configurable parent, we need to create an observer that hooks into an event which is triggered before the catalog_product_view is requested. The best event for this observer is controller_action_predispatch_catalog_product_view.

First we create our custom Observer-class in /app/code/DaanvdB/RedirectSimpleProducts/Observer/Predispatch.php and add the following code (inspired by StackOverflow):

The Observer we just created takes care of the entire process:

1. At first it checks if we’re on a catalog_product_view-page,
2. Then it checks if the current requests is a simple product,
3. If so, it finds it’s corresponding configurable parent and loads all available configurable attributes,
4. Then it takes the values for each configurable attribute from the simple product’s properties and builds an options array with them,
5. With this array it builds a query using Magento 2’s integrated URL parsing functionality.
6. The created query is appended to the configurable products’ URL-key and a Redirect is set.

Adding the Observer-class to an event

To trigger our custom Observer when the earlier mentioned event is triggered, we need to create a file called events.xml.

Create the file /app/code/DaanvdB/RedirectSimpleProducts/etc/events.xml:

The events.xml takes care of triggering our custom observer whenever the controller_action_predispatch_catalog_product_view is called.

That’s it! It is this simple to create a module that redirects simple products to their configurable parent product with pre-selected configurable attributes. Make sure you empty your cache (php bin/magento cache:flush) after you’ve copied the files to your site. Enjoy!