For example you want to extract the main product info, price, title, SKU etc and all the product attributes names and the product category. This might require multiple product / collection calls and when you multiply this by a search across 1000’s of products can become slow.

Magento Product Attribute Search and Filter

I wanted to provide a quick and easy way to search and filter magento products by attributes, in this case by colour, so customers could quickly narrow product selection down by selecting a colour and a filtering by category.

To extract the data I developed my Magento Product Data and Attribute exporter. This let me initially see how many attributes I had to work with, in this case how many different product colours were already configured.

To make colour selection simpler I created a new Magento attribute product_primary_colour and added a primary colour to each product so that I ended up with about 16 main colours that would provide a match to all the existing product attribute colours.

Once I had all my exported product data in a tab delimited text file I quickly realised that it would be relatively simple to search and filter this data via ajax requests.

I had initially thought it would be more effective to do the search within Magento using product collections but the speed of the search against the delimited txt data file made me think again. When I then added cached search results using Memcache I was happy that this solution would work.

The benefits of using the flat txt file are that it is quick and can run completely external from Magento in another webapp or in WordPress or Facebook.

The Magento attribute search and filter is easily customiseable and can search the data created by the export script filtering results from any of the product data columns in the export file. This could be colour, size, type etc, there are no limits.

If your product data is changing regularly simply export the data regularly via a cron job to keep it up to date.

if you need to filter your data by a completely new attribute simply pull the export data into Excel, create your new attribute data and corresponding Magento attribute and import the data back into Magento. Now you can export this data and easily search and filter it.

Here is an example of the attribute search running in an iframe using the Magento test product data. Here I have exported the color attribute, and am filtering against existing product categories like Womens, Mens and Shirts (note Mens matches Womens, some refinement needed there!). This will also easily run in Magento when setup in a static block containing the iframe data.

You can see how quickly the data is filtered and returned, try a search for Red to see some data. Click around the categories and check the debug footer which shows if the results were cached or not and how long the ajax query took to run.

Data from Magento DEV Store running Magento 1.9.x

Recently I had to export Magento product data to be used as import data for Amazon product listings. Specifically the products had a lot of different attributes associated with them and I wanted to export each product with all of its associated attribute data to map to the relevant Amazon product data.

To accomplish this I returned to my previous code and enhanced it to be able to export user defined Magento product and attribute data to a delimited text file (as well as creating product EAN barcodes which was a function of the original script.)

The script can extract the usual global product data e.g. price, description etc. as well as any custom product attributes.

The export data is configured in an array;

$_getProductData=array(
‘name’ => true,
‘description’ => false,
‘imageurl’ => true,
‘producturl’ => true,
‘type’ => false,
‘ean’ => false,
‘category’ => true
);

We set the array key value to true or false for the product data we want to export. The same applies to attribute data:

$_getProductAttributes=array(
‘colour1’ => ‘color’,
‘custom’ => ‘my_custom_attribute’
);

So here we are exporting the color product attribute as well as a custom attribute.

The tab delimited data is easily imported into Excel for manipulation and further import/export, for example adaption to an Excel format compatible with Amazon product imports.

This data can also become really useful if you want to provide fast external access to your product info for example, in an external app, on Facebook or even within Magento. See my product attribute search app for more information.

You can download the source code for this export script from my Github.

To run the script copy the files to your server and edit the configuration php file config/applicationConfig.php. Configure the paths to your Magento installation and the folder to export to.

Configure the product arrays by editing php/Application.php, edit $_getProductData and $_getProductAttributes.

To run the script execute it with php export.php debug from the command line. To run silently from a cron job leave the debug switch out.

You can also run the script from your web browser if you install it in a web accessible folder.

Here is an example of the output from my Magento dev store ::

id	sku	name	imageurl	producturl	category	colour1
51	1111	Ottoman	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/m/a/magento-red-furniture-set.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/magento-red-furniture-set.html	Living Room	Red
52	1112	Chair	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/m/a/magento-red-furniture-set.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/magento-red-furniture-set.html	Living Room	Red
53	1113	Couch	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/m/a/magento-red-furniture-set.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/magento-red-furniture-set.html	Living Room	Red
83	cn	CN Clogs Beach/Garden Clog	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/c/n/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.html	Mens	xxx
29	cn_3	CN Clogs Beach/Garden Clog	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/c/n/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.html	Mens	Blue
84	cn_4	CN Clogs Beach/Garden Clog	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/c/n/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.html	Mens	Blue
85	cn_5	CN Clogs Beach/Garden Clog	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/media/catalog/product/c/n/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.jpg	http://dev.gaiterjones.com/magento/cn-clogs-beach-garden-clog.html	Mens	Blue

xxx