Posting Variable Products to Woocommerce from Formidable Forms

Hi there I am trying to work out the best way to post variable products to Woocommerce from the front end of my WordPress site (for listing holidays). Currently I am using Formidable Forms to capture and submit the data along with a few custom pieces of php.

The current setup is using two forms that are linked together:

Form 1: Posts the parent Woocommerce Product to the tables: wp_posts and wp_postmeta. When I submit Form 1 it sets the post as post_type "product" and sets its product type (taxonomy) as a "Variable product", it also pushes the required serialised array data into the meta_key "_product_attributes" in the wp_postmeta table. The attribute added is called "duration". An example of this data from the the table is:

a:1:{s:11:"pa_duration";a:6:{s:4:"name";s:11:"pa_duration";s:5:"value";s:0:"";s:8:"position";i:0;s:10:"is_visible";i:0;s:12:"is_variation";i:1;s:11:"is_taxonomy";i:1;}}

Form 2: Creates additional posts of post_type "product_variation" and adds to the wp_posts and wp_postmeta tables all the required information such as _regular_price. It also adds an entry for the meta_key "attribute_duration" with the value that matches the serialised array data sent in Form 1.

My problem is that this injection of database data does not seem to translate to a complete variable product in wp-admin.

Despite adding the data to the Database, I still need to head to the post edit page and:

Create the attribute with name "duration" Set its value Set it as used for variations Save

When I have done this I can see my added variations listed on the variations tab, but I also need to assign them to an attribute value.

Do I need to call a WordPress or Woocommerce action hook to get this work after the posts have hit the database?

I have tried to work out what is going on when using the edit product dialogue by scanning this code: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/master/includes/admin/meta-boxes/class-wc-meta-box-product-data.php but its a bit beyond me.

Any clues would be appreciated as I am still getting to grips with formidable hooks and none of the help desk examples or the documentation seems to address variable product creation completely.