Virtuemart - Adding attributes issue and using Child Products

I'll try and  put together a tutorial for this and write and more descriptive blog about this soon. However here's some notes on the issue.

#the problem : I need to stock inventory all Atrributes in Joomla Virtuemart.

Solutions: First of all I came across this Component Easy Stock Control  but its a commercial solution that cost almost £100 and was written a couple of years back.

Another solution is to make Child items of a product - you could then make a SKU for each item.

In the scenario I'm working on we have 2 attribute - Size and Colour.  For this I could use Colour as a child product and then have a size list for each one.

This forum post explains what needs to be done Attributes / Child Products and the relevant manual information is here Virtuemart Manual Attribute and Child Products .  However I am getting this error when adding an attribute 'Error: At least one attribute name is empty'   and 'Error: Saving the attribute failed.'

I have though found a solution on how you can set up Child Products.


> Set up a Main Product
> on the 'products list' go to the table column 'Clone Product' and clone the products you want a child of.
> change the name and SKU - ie add the colour to the end of the description
> repeat this process for all your colours
> go back into the parent product you've created and scroll down to 'Extra IDs' here you need to add the IDs of the child products you want to appear on the Parents product page. 


there's a lot more to come from me regarding this, as I'll need to tweak this a fair bit so it looks really good.