Magento custom development and freelance programming

addAttributeToFilter not working?

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:34:00 +0000

If you are wondering why your

$collection->addAttributeToFilter('color','24');

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is not filtering the collection properly, that’s because the attribute is not set to Yes in Admin, on “Used in product listing?” field. Oddly enough, Magento only adds such attributes to its catalog_product_flat table, so if your attribute is not in it, no filtering is gonna happen. So, put your attribute to yes for “Used in product listing?” and try again.

Edit: don’t forget to reindex Flat product data after you’re done (thanks Igor!).

Magic variables not parsing on frontend

admin — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:53:04 +0000

You created a new custom attribute for your product or category in Magento, but when you add magic variables, such as:

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whole thing messes up formatting and HTML, and your image is not visible on frontend. Seems like Magento doesn’t transform {{}} to image URL – reason is simple – you didn’t set your attribute’s is_html_allowed_on_front value to Yes (or “1″). Set it to true, and Magento starts parsing those magic variables.

Add category attribute in module installation

admin — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:09:06 +0000

It’s often required during custom development of a module to add an attribute to category. You could always hack your client’s database, but that’s not the right way to do it, especially ’cause Magento has support for it in it’s API. So the best way to do it is to install it during module’s DB installation. Here’s a code that will generate a new category attribute when put into install-* or update-* file in *_setup folder.

$installer = $this;
$installer->addAttribute(Mage_Catalog_Model_Category::ENTITY, 'size_chart', array(
        'type'              => 'text',
        'backend'           => '',
        'frontend'          => '',
        'label'             => 'Size Chart',
        'input'             => 'textarea',
        'class'             => '',
        'source'            => '',
        'global'            => '0',
        'visible'           => true,
        'required'          => false,
        'user_defined'      => true,
        'default'           => '',
        'searchable'        => false,
        'filterable'        => false,
        'comparable'        => false,
        'visible_on_front'  => true,
        'used_in_product_listing' => false,
        'unique'            => false,
        'wysiwyg_enabled'   => true,
        'apply_to'          => '',
        'is_configurable'   => true
    ));
 
$installer->addAttributeToSet(Mage_Catalog_Model_Category::ENTITY, '3', '4', 'size_chart','6');
$installer->addAttributeToGroup(Mage_Catalog_Model_Category::ENTITY, '3', '4', 'size_chart','6');

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Now, I’m not sure if you need both addAttributeToSet and addAttributeToGroup calls, and am also pretty sure that there’s a more clever way to mark attribute set id and attribute group id than ’3′ and ’4′, so if you find it, do leave a comment.

Customers who bought this

admin — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:09:01 +0000

“Customers who bought this also bought” is a rather common requirement for store owners. And while there are many modules out there doing this, it’s surprising to know that this is, in essence, actually a very simple SQL query. Most of the work is just displaying the list on frontend and creating correct structure. First you need to fetch all order ids that have a specific product id in them, then select all product ids from that subset, exclude the product id of current product and sort it by number of times product id appeared in the sales table – and it all fits into a single query. So if someone is trying to sell you a story that this is a huge feature, know that it’s actually only 3-5 hours of work.

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