I updated this file in my test build and things are slightly better in that ‘Free’ isn’t displaying anymore.
I think the next step would be to modify the code such that if ‘Show Out of Stock items’ is true and price is not empty, it should return the price.
One curious thing that I noticed and may be of interest to you Mike. I am using a child theme with a custom functions.php. In this I am hooking my custom functions to:
1. Override the default ‘From-to’ range notation for variations with different pricing to show a simple ‘Starting from’ followed by the minimum price of the variation (irrespective of whether it is out of stock or not since the business logic for display is non-discretionary on this factor).
2. Replace the default ‘Sale’ notation with a banner with maximum percentage discount available.
In the first case, because I just need the minimum/maximum variation regular price and sale price, I am using the get_variation_price() (for current price) and get_variation_regular_price() (for regular price). From what I understood in the function definition, both these functions place calls to the get_variation_prices() function, which in turn calls the get_price() function that is part of the WC_Product class definition. Effectively the $price, $regular_price and $sale_price properties are not getting populated for the variation if it is out of stock. Hence those functions are turning up blanks (or previously ‘Free’ price tags).
In the second case, since I need to calculate the discount for each variant and then display the lowest one, I am handling the price myself using get_post_meta(). In this case, I am checking for regular price and active price to both be populated and ignoring cases where regular price is blank (to avoid divide by zero situations). Out of Sale notification are handled by a filter hook on woocommerce_get_availability that displays a custom Out of Sale notice. In this case I am getting proper results where the sales banner is getting the correct sales percentage irrespective of whether the variation is In Stock or not.
Since I am using the Mystile theme, I even thought to switch back once to the parent theme and give it a go but in line with my expectation, it was the same behaviour. (Plus the same child theme was working till yesterday so my deduction is that something changes in the function my custom functions are calling, causing a break in functionality).
So, I’m going to get down into the bowels of the php code to see if I can fix it (on my local copy, of course. Live store is back to 2.3 for now.) Please do let me know if you figure something out before I do (odds on you will!)
