Hotcakes access variant prices via SingleProductViewModel - e-commerce

Question

From the SingleProductViewModel, what is the best way to access prices for the variants associated with the product? From the documentation page linked above, I see that SingleProductViewModel contains a Product object, but I'm not sure how to use that to get prices of variants. (I can't find a listing of properties for the Product object).
Here is my specific use case: I have a Hotcakes Category Viewer and I'd like each product listed to display the range of prices for all variants of that product, rather than just the price for the main product. For example, a fedora product would display price as "$10 - $30" if the product contained variants with prices of $10, $20, and $30. I happen to be using the "simple" view of the category viewer, so am expecting to implement this in _RenderSingleProductSimple.cshtml, however I'm interested in using this for other category views, too.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

From what I've seen, most people will change their viewset to say something like "Starting at [PRICE]" or "As Low As [PRICE]" when there is a variant detected.
If you'd like to show the full range of prices, this can be done too, but you should know that depending on how many products that have variants and how many variants overall in the view, this could result in a negative performance impact on the site. How much impact is seen could range from negligible to undesirable.
The documentation you mentioned includes information about the Item property of the SingleProductViewModel class. This property includes all of the variant information you'd be looking for.
So, what you could do is use the Item.HasVariants property to determine if you need to have a different label. If that returns true, you can then iterate through the Item.Variants property to get all of the prices and find the lowest and highest ones to display.

Answer 2

Thanks #Will Strohl, that is helpful information.
I've put together the following code which seems to be achieving the original aim. Note that I said "variants" in the question, and these are product variants in our implementation, however we are achieving price adjustments for the variants via product options, so the code below looks at Model.Item.Options rather than Model.Item.Variants. Also, regarding price, I ignored user price details that weren't relevant to our implementation, and so used Model.Item.ListPrice rather than Model.UserPrice.DisplayPrice.
<div class="hc-recprice">
#{
string priceToDisplay = "";
if (Model.Item.HasOptions()){
decimal minPrice = Decimal.MaxValue;
decimal maxPrice = Decimal.MinValue;
decimal oiPrice = 0;
Hotcakes.Commerce.Catalog.OptionList options = Model.Item.Options;
foreach (Hotcakes.Commerce.Catalog.Option o in options){
foreach (Hotcakes.Commerce.Catalog.OptionItem oi in o.Items){
oiPrice = Model.Item.ListPrice + oi.PriceAdjustment;
if (oiPrice < minPrice) {
minPrice = oiPrice;
}
if (oiPrice > maxPrice) {
maxPrice = oiPrice;
}
}
}
if(minPrice == maxPrice){
priceToDisplay = string.Format("{0:C0}", minPrice);
} else {
priceToDisplay = string.Format("{0:C0}", minPrice) + " - " + string.Format("{0:C0}", maxPrice);
}
} else {
priceToDisplay = string.Format("{0:C0}", Model.Item.ListPrice);
}
#Html.Raw(priceToDisplay)
}
</div>