How to get information of all the variants in the search results?

This is useful to display variant swatches on your products in the search result pages for example.

Since the integration stores variants, and not products directly, in the Algolia index you need to do extra work to display information of all variants for each product.

You can do this in one of the following ways:

• Call the Algolia Search API
  You can fetch information for all variants by making a search call while filtering on _tags:\"id:${product_id}\" and setting distinct to false.
• Call the Shopify storefront API
  You can also fetch all variants of a product with the Shopify storefront API.
• Store all the variant data in a metafield
  It’s also possible to add all the variant information to a metafield associated with a product and index it via Algolia.

Storing variant data in a metafield

The basic process to follow would be to:

1. Fetch all the products one by one
   You can do this via the GET /admin/api/2020-10/products.json endpoint using cursor based pagination.
2. Create the desired data structure by going through the variants for the fetched products
   You can use tags or metafields to store this information. Since tags have a limit of 255 characters, it’s best to use metafields containing a JSON string of the variants data. This way, the front end can decode the JSON and use the content.
3. Update the metafields or tags on the products one by one
   You can do this with the PUT /admin/api/{version}/products/{product_id}.json endpoint for tags, or the POST admin/products/#{id}/metafields.json endpoint for metafields.
4. Configure the Algolia app to pick up this information
   Metafields can be configured from the Indexing tab of the app, while tags are indexed by default. Once completed, search results return this data in the meta attribute.