woocommerce: product attribute will not add value

Question

I'm programmatically creating attribute variations (variable product). Everything I've seen does this easily, but the value simply does not show up. Here's my code:

$thedata = Array(
     'pa_performance_dates' =>  Array( 
          'name'        => 'pa_performance_dates', 
           'value'      =>  $arrayOfTermIDs,
           'position'   => 1,
           'is_visible' => '1',
           'is_variation' => '1',
           'is_taxonomy' => '1'
      )
);
update_post_meta( $product_id, '_product_attributes', $thedata );

Attribute: "Performance Dates" WORKING
Attribute Values (terms under attribute): "1571986800" WORKING
Attribute Values being added under the Product ID: NOT WORKING

I have tried everything: setting the VALUE above to an array of the terms slugs, an array of the IDs, a simple string of an ID or slug/value. Nothing works. I've also followed these stackoverflow questions:
woocommerce: add value to a product attribute
Creating WooCommerce product variation adds an empty attribute value
Add Product Attributes with values to a product in Woocommerce

I've also tested the product_id variable and that is correctly showing the ID of the post.

What am I doing wrong?????!?

Answer 1

To add value to an attribute of a product use wp_set_object_terms

For example: $arrayOfTermIDs = array( 'Test1', 'Test2', 'Test3' );

foreach ($arrayOfTermIDs as $arrayOfTermID) {
    $term_taxonomy_ids = wp_set_object_terms( $product_id, $arrayOfTermID, 'pa_performance_dates', true );          
}

To append the value set the last argument as true or set it to false to overwrite.