This post was last updated 9 years 7 months 15 days ago, some of the information contained here may no longer be actual and any referenced software versions may have been updated!The Magento product database is pretty flexible when it comes to extracting product information. Sometimes however, extracting all the information you want for a product is not so easy.
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.
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