Question

I am currently making a module so that users see on the checkout page something like: “People who purchased product X also purchased Y, Z and T”.

I made a cronjob to calculate which are the related products for each product, and I added an attribute to products in the install script.

I decided (for simplicity) – to store the most related 5 products, so I want to store something like: 123-3-5543-1290-9911. But I don’t want the administrator to see this anywhere, and I tried the following:

$setup->addAttribute('catalog_product', $attrCode, array(
    // more stuff
    'type' => 'hidden',
    'input' => 'text',
    'visible' => 0,
    // more stuff
));

I looked here: http://blog.chapagain.com.np/magento-adding-attribute-from-mysql-setup-file/ and I found some interesting stuff, but not how to completely hide this field.

The alternative would be to create my own table, but this seems to be a slightly more elegant solution.

What do you think? Is it better to create my own table, or to add an attribute and hide it?

Thank you

Answer 1

Setting the ‘is_visible’ property to 0 for catalog attributes will hide them from the admin forms in the backend, as can be seen from this code (Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Widget_Form::_setFieldset()):

 protected function _setFieldset($attributes, $fieldset, $exclude=array())
    {
        $this->_addElementTypes($fieldset);
        foreach ($attributes as $attribute) {
            /* @var $attribute Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Attribute */
            if (!$attribute || ($attribute->hasIsVisible() && !$attribute->getIsVisible())) {
                continue;
            }

So execute

 $setup->updateAttribute('catalog_product', $attrCode, 'is_visible', '0');