Database | Inchoo

Programmatically create upsell, cross sell and related products in Magento

Damir Serfezi — Sep 21, 2017

This article will explain how to add upsell, cross sell and related products programmatically to Magento. One of practical examples would be data migration from some other ecommerce system to Magento. You can read a nice article on how to add upsell, cross sell and related products from administration here. It explains what all these product relations mean and where are they used on the site.

External database connection in Magento

Damir Serfezi — Apr 27, 2017

Most of the time working with Magento, a single database connection is just enough. Magento has excellent system of adding new tables in database or extending existing ones. So, why would there be a need for an external database connection outside the Magento system? Well, one of the examples is data migration from another ecommerce system. In this article, a simple connection to external database is explained with CRUD (create, read, update, delete) examples.

Thou Shalt Not Do Inserts in a Foreach … Unless You Know The Trick

Ivan Curdinjakovic — Jan 19, 2016

TL;DR;

Don’t do it. Just, simply, never write a database query inside a loop. Ever. Put in a little bit of effort and write code that will insert or read all data in one big batch, or at least group big chunks of data in the smallest possible number of queries. That’s it. Move on. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Magento – Install, install upgrade, data and data upgrade scripts

Branko Ajzele — Sep 07, 2013

If you are in the business of creating your own custom extension (module) for magento, then chances are that at some point you will need your extension to be able to persist data to database, this is where the installation scripts come in place. Later on, when you upgrade your extension and decide to add few new tables to database or few new columns to database table that was initially created by the original installation extension you will need to look for upgrade script. Finally, if you want to set some initial default values in the database tables of your extension you will need to look for data scripts.

How to create a custom grid from scratch

Vedran Sola — Mar 03, 2013

We received a request from a client where they wanted to implement an expanded order grid while still keeping the default Magento’s one. For this example we’ll create a new module named Inchoo Orders.

Prepared filter for Magento admin grids

Ivan Galambos — Oct 29, 2012

Maybe you can ask yourself why do I need prepared data for filters in my collections – in Magento admin grids. Well, I can perhaps create new grid and action for some custom functionality and show such grid and then additionally do (filter by) whatever I need.

But notice that if you create such collection with some addFieldToFilter() method you always use specified filter for that collection.
If you are interested how to use only one collection for showing different results for that collection (prepared filter), keep reading.

How to multiselect and filter in magento admin grids – IN and NOT IN

Ivan Galambos — Oct 28, 2012

Did you ever need to create grid in Magento administration that is filterable by more column’s values, i.e. something from multiselect drop-down. Or perhaps more specific, you want to export all pending orders (order status: pending, pending_payment, pending_paypal) but you aren’t satisfied with Magento implementation of selecting, searching and exporting one by one pending order status. If you’re interested how I implemented similar behavior with input text field, simulating MySQL “IN” and “NOT IN” statement, keep reading!

Magento: Date format troubles

Darko Goles — Sep 24, 2012

In this post, I will just mention some of the issues with date format from my own experience, in hope that this will help somebody to save few hours of tracing Magento to find the solution :-).

Solving problems with Category tree database information

Nikola Stojiljkovic — Jun 03, 2012

Did you ever had a problem where you can not see all available categories in “Categories” tab while editing a product? Does your Indexer process hangs when updating “Catalog URL rewrites”? At the same time your category tree looks just fine on “Manage Categories” menu and you can see assigned products in each category? This issue can happen for a number of reasons, but it usually happens when you are using some bad script for importing category information from some other 3rd party system (like switching your shop from osCommerce, for example). Well, look no further, here’s the solution.

Flat tables in Magento and product collection

Domagoj Potkoc — May 30, 2011

You probaly know that Magento uses EAV database structure for categories, products. In some cases this solution is not the best or fastest.

Guide through Magento’s timezones

Mladen Lotar — May 30, 2011

I’ll guide you through Magento’s timezone behavior, as I’ve noticed that people tend to get confused in cases when they have 2 or more websites with different timezones. If this is what you are searching for, read on!

How to translate form labels in Magento’s Admin Area

Ivan Galambos — May 25, 2011

Since Magento has built in functionality for translations, you can ask yourself why Magento doesn’t want to translate my labels… and everything is set up correctly!
For all of you who work on Magento for a while and you didn’t yet needed to translate everything in Magento admin area here is a short “howto” on what you can do:
go to app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Widget/Form.php
and find protected function _setFieldset($attributes, $fieldset, $exclude=array())
Instead of this line

//'label' => $attribute->getFrontend()->getLabel(),
//put this:
'label' => Mage::helper('core')->__($attribute->getFrontend()->getLabel()),

Of course you will not change Magento’s core file in this way 🙂 (more below).

How to add new custom category attribute in Magento

Vedran Subotic — Mar 28, 2011

Sometimes you need to extend functionality of Magento categories. There is several ways to do that, I will show you how it can be done.
You can do that by modifying and adding data into some of tables directly, but it can be waste of time if you don’t know what you are doing.
This post will describe how you can add new custom category attribute in your Magento store via sql_setup script.

Create configuration for your Magento extension

Mladen Lotar — Feb 15, 2011

Today I’m going to give you and quick HOW-TO for beginners on how to create simple configuration for your extension inside Magento’s configuration section.
If you’re interested, read on:

Setup for automatic Magento database backup in Git

Mladen Lotar — Jan 28, 2011

Well, any version control system is great, at least in compare with none at all. But what’s happening with your database? Today I’ll show you how to create automated solution for backup and insertion of MySQL database into Git repository.

Mysteries of Magento Encryption Key

Tomislav Bilic — Jun 18, 2010

If you ever went through Magento installation process, you know that at some point you are asked for Magento Encryption key. Magento will automatically generate one for you if you do not enter anything in this field. For first installation, this is just fine. You will see a note that Magento uses this key to encrypt passwords, credit cards and more. Is this really the case?

Magento MySQL database diagram

Tomislav Bilic — Oct 20, 2008

If you worked with osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or any similar eCommerce platform before, you might find Magento database structure quite confusing when you see it for the first time. I advise you not to rush too much figuring out what is what by glancing through database. Try to spend first few hours getting familiar with some background. For purposes of flexibility, the Magento database heavily utilizes an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model. As is often the case, the cost of flexibility is complexity. Is there something in Magento that is simple from developers point of view?