While setting up my store, I noticed that, although you can add attributes to a product kit, they don't actually do anything (correct me if I'm wrong on that). To wit, you can add an attribute to the kit at large, give it options and adjustments, even make the attribute required, but it won't actually show up when viewing the product kit page. And even if you made the attribute mandatory, you can go ahead and add the kit to your cart without any problems. I don't know if this is the intended behavior, or a side effect of having product kits mimic the product interface, without actually being products.

But what if you could have an attribute for the kit, which is tied to the attributes of the component products? For example, I'm setting up a store for selling sheet music, and for a given product (a part or score to a given piece), I have an attribute by which the customer can specify whether they want a printed part, a downloadable part, or both. In a product kit defined for, say, the set of all individual parts to a given piece, instead of having a separate attribute selection tool for the format each component part, what if I could just have a single format attribute for the whole kit? Although this takes away some functionality from the customer -- they could ordinarily choose to print some parts and download others -- this would make the selection a lot more streamlined, and sometimes this extra functionality is not desired. In my case, I think that a customer who wants to download one part probably wants to download all of them; in other cases, certain combinations of attributes might not be compatible, if the component parts need to fit together in some way.

I'm not entirely sure how this would work, in general. One though is that you could set an attribute for the product kit to be "linked" to its component products; any component product that has that particular attribute would have that attribute set to whatever option was chosen for the kit at large. Or, to prevent conflicts when some products have disabled certain options, maybe for a given kit attribute, you can select a set of product attributes, which all have the same option ranges, to be linked to.

I realize that a lot of this behavior can be modeled simply by defining the particular collection of products as a new product, rather than a product kit; however, in this case we lose the ability to have the collection inherit properties like adjustments and features from its component parts. What do you think?