Today I had to change the values of a magento product attribute.

Attribute before

I had an attribute color with the values:

• aqua
• black
• blue
• fuchsia
• ... (all other CSS2.1 color names)

And I had to change it to german values.

So I had a look into $installer->addAttribute() the method checks wether the attribute exists or not and calles $this->updateAttribute().

Great, let's just update the Attribute

I updated the attribute, the result was:

• aqua
• black
• braun (german: brown)
• blau (german: blue)
• blue
• ...

That is wrong.

Just remove the wrong values

I didn't find a way to remove the values from an attribute. If you have one, tell me!

Solution

The easiest and nicest way I found was:

$installer->removeAttribute(Mage_Catalog_Model_Product::ENTITY, 'color');
// [...]
$installer->addAttribute(Mage_Catalog_Model_Product::ENTITY, 'color', $data);

Remove the attribute and create it with the new values.

Bad thing about it? All values will be deleted for all products!