Magento custom development and freelance programming

Simulate / fake a module

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:03:20 +0000

I found that I needed to trick Magento into thinking it’s using one of it’s own core modules instead of a custom one, when I needed to retain certain URL-s instead of using my own module’s controller. So, to hack Magento so that it returns it’s own core module with

$this->getUrl('*/*/*');

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you shoud utilize this code on the controller level ideally:

$this->getRequest()->setRouteName('catalog');

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Where “catalog” is the core module you want to fake.

Only 3 products on Wishlist page

admin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:20:45 +0000

I just finished debugging an issue where wishlist page in my account would only display 3 products.

Here’s how it goes.

Wishlist collection is being cached during runtime. When the parser reaches sidebar, Mage_Wishlist_Block_Customer_Sidebar class will limit this collection to only three results. Which is fine in default magento, since the wishlist sidebar is parsed only after the content part ends.

BUT, if you have something like this in your header:

>
     type="wishlist/customer_sidebar" as="wishlist" before="cart_sidebar" template="wishlist/sidebar.phtml"/>
>

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Translated, if you call the wishlist sidebar block in the header, header being parsed before the content area, collection will be limited to three products, hence causing the bug list in the content area to show only three products.

So, if something similar happens to you, you know where to look.

Remove head block from page

admin — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 08:12:51 +0000

When developing a Magento custom module that should use an AJAX response of a page that’s bigger then a few blocks, you’d probably like to have all those script files removed from head. Now, you can either unset head block entirely, or just remove the script files. What you need to do is to create an observer on

controller_action_layout_render_before

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event, and create this observer function:

public function removeHead()
{
	if (Mage::app()->getRequest()->getModuleName() == "lazyload") { //put your module/controller/action name here so you don't remove head for every single page
		$layout = Mage::getSingleton('core/layout');
		$layout->unsetBlock('head');
 
		/* second level of destruction - because this block has two lives .. like a final queen in an arcade */
 
		$head = $layout->getBlock('root')->getChild('head');
		if (is_object($head)) {
			$head->setData('items',array());
			$layout->getBlock('root')->setChild('head',$head);
		}
 
		/* third level of destruction - if the bitch respawns */
		//$layout->getBlock('root')->setChild('head', new Mage_Core_Block_Template);
	}
}

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take a look at what it does, might give you some more ideas on how to battle the pest.

Layered navigation not showing up on search results

admin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 06:23:32 +0000

If you’re having this error in Magento, that’s probably because number of your search results exceeded 2000. Magento has a setting in admin that disables layered navigation if there are more than 2000 search results. You can remove this threshold here:
System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Catalog Search -> Apply Layered Navigation if Search Results are Less Than

But beware that this might impact your search result page performance. I did some minor benchmarking and it turned out it took my server about 300-400ms more to display search page with 3500 results if this limit is removed and layered navigation displayed.

Get Bestsellers collection

admin — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:41:42 +0000

It’s actually pretty easy to get up to date list of bestselling products from your database. It all fits into just one sql query:

SELECT `e`.*, `bs`.* FROM `catalog_product_entity` AS `e` INNER JOIN (SELECT `sales_flat_order_item`.`product_id`, SUM(`qty_ordered`) AS `count` FROM `sales_flat_order_item` GROUP BY `product_id`) AS `bs` ON bs.product_id = e.entity_id ORDER BY `bs`.`count` DESC

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In Magento’s language, that looks like this:

$select = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_read')
        	->select()
	        ->from('sales_flat_order_item', array('product_id', 'count' => 'SUM(`qty_ordered`)'))
        	->group('product_id');
 
$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
	->getCollection();
 
$collection->getSelect()
	->join( array ('bs' => $select),
			'bs.product_id = e.entity_id')
	->order('bs.count DESC');

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So, it suddenly became suprisingly easy to make that bestsellers custom module? This is just for demonstration purposes, so make sure you replace the statics such as ‘sales_flat_order_item’ with appropriate Magento’s API calls.

Add Magento SEO rewrite to your link

admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 08:31:36 +0000

I recently built a custom module whose controller extends Magento Catalog module, and I wanted it to use same rewrites as Catalog does on AJAX calls I was doing. So only thing I needed to do is this:

    $params['_use_rewrite'] = true;
    return $this->getUrl('standard/category/view/',$params);

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This will transform your native URL (in this case www.website.com/standard/category/view/) to the name of the actual category you’re calling. Of course, you also need to provide category ID in get

Print collection MySQL query in Magento

admin — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 17:19:15 +0000

When working with collections, it’s always useful to be able to have a peak at the actual MySQL code that gets executed, especially if you’re doing some filtering, sorting, or some other custom development. You can see the actual query by executing this code on your collection object:

$collection->getSelect()->assemble();

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Magento SQL conditionals

admin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:13:43 +0000

Some time ago, I found a helpful post that lists available Magento SQL conditionals for managing collections. It maybe shows that Magento doesn’t have a broad support for SQL collection filtering? Anyway it’s linked above

Add image to product programatically

admin — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 12:30:25 +0000

Today I found a neat little method inside Magento’s API, the one that will allow you to assign an image to catalog product through code, wherever that image may sit in your filesystem. This is particularly useful if you are custom developing product importer or updater and you need to update product image with the one from the feed. This function is called addImageToMediaGallery() and can be run even if the product has not been saved yet. Here’s an example:

$product->addImageToMediaGallery('ABSOLUTE_PATH','image',true,false);

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This snippet will add an image residing in ABSOLUTE_PATH to product, assign it to “image” attribute, move it from original location (true), and uncheck the “Exclude” option (false). Here’s Magento documentation on the method:

void addImageToMediaGallery (string $file, [string|array $mediaAttribute = null], [boolean $move = false], [boolean $exclude = true])

string $file: file path of image in file system
string|array $mediaAttribute: code of attribute with type ‘media_image’, leave blank if image should be only in gallery
boolean $move: if true, it will move source file
boolean $exclude: mark image as disabled in product page view

Update to Magento 1.5 using shell

admin — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:04:10 +0000

Ok, since Varien did a brilliant job of screwing up Magento upgrade using Downloader (so far I haven’t found a way of doing it – Mage All Latest returns “already installed”), only reasonable way to do it is using shell. But there are quirks. First you have to edit file “mage” that sits in your installation root, otherwise you’re likely to get a memory limit problem. Edit your php location from this:

# REPLACE with your PHP5 binary path (example: /usr/local/php5/bin/php )
#MAGE_PHP_BIN="php"

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to this, in my case, in yours it’s more likely different (this page might help you locate php):

# REPLACE with your PHP5 binary path (example: /usr/local/php5/bin/php )
MAGE_PHP_BIN="/opt/lampp/bin/php"

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after that, execute this line:

./mage install http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community Mage_All_Latest --force

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That should do it.