Programatically assign variation visibility

If you’re looking to assign the variaton visibility in your store and don’t want to do it on a per-product basis, you can do so with the code on this page.

WooCommerce stores the visibility in a hidden taxonomy named product_visibility. The possible terms of this taxonomy are:

• exclude-from-catalog
• exclude-from-filtered
• exclude-from-search
• featured
• outofstock
• rated-1
• rated-2
• rated-3
• rated-4
• rated-5

Show Single Variations makes use of only the first 4: exclude-from-catalog, exclude-from-filtered, exclude-from-search, and featured.

You can programatically assign any of these terms with a code snippet like this:

$variation_id = 4053;
$append       = false;
$terms        = array( 'exclude-from-catalog' );
wp_set_object_terms( $variation_id, $terms, 'product_visibility', $append );

Please replace the value of $variation_id with the ID of variation that you want to update.

You would also need to change post meta _visibility. This is used to set the value of these checkboxes:

$visibility = array( 'catalog', 'filtered', 'search' );
update_post_meta( $variation_id, '_visibility', $visibility );

Example

To show a variation in catalog, search and filtered results, use this code:

$variation_id = 4053;
$append       = false; // Replace terms, don't append.
$terms        = array();
wp_set_object_terms( $variation_id, $terms, 'product_visibility', $append );

$visibility = array( 'catalog', 'filtered', 'search' );
update_post_meta( $variation_id, '_visibility', $visibility );

To hide a variation from catalog, search and filtered results, use this code:

$variation_id = 4053;
$append       = false; // Replace terms, don't append.
$terms        = array( 'exclude-from-catalog', 'exclude-from-filtered', 'exclude-from-search' );
wp_set_object_terms( $variation_id, $terms, 'product_visibility', $append );

$visibility = array();
update_post_meta( $variation_id, '_visibility', $visibility );