Views disappear after tagging a non-product node, how to now control the placement, scaling, etc of product images?

Hi all,

I have the following issue, I'm not sure if it is a bug in the inline_entity_reference module or commerce_backoffice or commerce itself. I have found a way to work around it but now I'm running into another issue. I'll explain:

I use panels, the node_view variant for my product displays. I populate the panels layout preferably with views elements instead of the fields that are provided to panels by default. So for instance, instead of the "Node title" field, I would create a view which displays the "node being viewed: title".

This works for all elements that belong to the node. For elements that belong to the product, it is off course a whole lot more complicated. However, after much work I got to the proper relationships and contexts and I got that to work as well. So I have views content panes that show the price for the product display that is being viewed, as well as all the other product elements. The reason I'm working with views displays by the way, is because I find they are easier to style though the UI instead of adding custom css to my theme.

Now to the bug, when I construct my page layouts this way, with a node_view panels variant populated by views displays of the different fields, I can add and tag new products and everything is fine. I use commerce_backoffice so I have a few vocabularies that are used to try and create a product catalog (this is proving to be very complicated to achieve too, but that is a different story). Now when I create a node that is not a product (any given node that has a term_reference field) and I tag that node, all of a sudden all the view elements that show product information just disappear. So I can add 10 products and tag them differently and all is fine. Now I create a basic page for instance, and tag that one, and all my product displays are suddenly broken. The fields related to the product just go away and only the node elements still show. So I have a title but not a price, and no product images anymore.

The workaround I use now is to not use views displays and I have added some contributed modules that help provide extra syling options to panels. So I still have control of the styling of the different fields in my node_view variant through a UI. But, now I'm having a problem when multiple images are uploaded to a single variation. With the use of views, I could just make two views. One of the main image and one of the remaining images and have these two content panes or blocks (or whatever) to place anywhere in my layouts. But off course, I can't use views anymore to do this and now the multiple images are just showing underneath each other. I've gone to the manage display settings page for the image upload field but there are no settings there other than the imagecache preset that needs to be used.

How can I control the placement, scaling, etc of product images when multiple files are uploaded without being able to use views? I'd like the main image to be big and the additional images to be displayed in smaller sizes next to it. Limited of course to a given number of images. My image field is attached to the product variation and they need to remain so, unfortunately, because of different color variations.

Hope anyone has any thoughts on this.... Thanks in advance.