Retrieving product information in Magento

If you are developing Magento template sooner or later you will need to obtain some product information and rearrange it to fit your template. One of the most useful function while working with Magento is Mage::getModel($modelClass).

Here is how you would use it to retrieve Magento product information Mage::getModel(‘catalog/product’);.

This ‘catalog/product’ relates to app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Product.php file. If you open that file you will see it’s actually a class named Mage_Catalog_Model_Product. That same class is extending the Mage_Catalog_Model_Abstract class meaning it inherits all of it’s methods.

For the last few weeks I’ve been using NetBeans 6.5beta, regularly downloading night builds of it. Let’s suppose you open the /template/catalog/category/view.phtml file (ar any other from template folder) and you write down the “Mage_Catalog_Model_Product” + “Ctrl + Space” NetBeans will give you a code completion with all of the available methods that go along with the class.

All you need to do is something like

$cProduct = Mage::getModel(‘catalog/product’);

Don’t let the name variable $cProduct confuse you. I’m using the letter “c” as a sort of personal standard, stands for custom. After you created the variable containing the model “catalog/product” you can then call all of the methods of Mage_Catalog_Model_Product on it.

Here is how:

$cProduct->load(152);

echo ‘<p>Product name: <strong>’ . $cProduct->getName() . ‘</strong></p>’;
echo ‘<p>Product price: <strong>’ . $cProduct->getPrice() . ‘</strong></p>’;
echo ‘<p>Product url: <strong>’ . $cProduct->getProductUrl() . ‘</strong></p>’;
echo ‘<p>Product Category: <strong>’ . $cProduct->getCategory() . ‘</strong></p>’;
echo ‘<p>Product image url: <strong>’ . $cProduct->getImageUrl() . ‘</strong></p>’;
echo ‘<p>Product status (this one is boolean): <strong>’ . $cProduct->getStatus() . ‘</strong></p>’;
echo ‘<p>Product weight: <strong>’ . $cProduct->getWeight() . ‘</strong></p>’;

Most important line in the above code is the $cProduct->load(152);. This is where you tell the $cProduct variable to point to product with id 152 (it was 152 on my working sample, it could be any other number). You can see the products id value if you log on to the Admin interrface and go to Catalog > Manage products > And look into the table listing all the products.

Getting models by getModel() function isn’t limited to product only. I suggest you play around with as much models as you can. Results can be very useful.

Hope some of you find this useful. Feel free to provide some feedback.