Question

I am reading a ton of docs about Magento’s API, Magento’s Models and Direct SQL calls. As I was reading that, the first conclusion is that direct sql calls would be very faster but I must take a special care at security, and the use of models make the development faster and easier but in the other hand, it loses performance manipulating huge catalogs.

I will have to deal with a shop with around 50k of products & heavy traffic, and I must export them to another server with category hierarchy, sku, description, image, product_name, url_path once and after it get only the updated ones once a hour. The best approach would be with direct sql calls, but will it be a suicide to make it with models? And do you think that integrate it with the SOAP API will be another suicide, and I should make it in a separate PHP to do this?

Super thanks in advance, I am very lost at this, and sorry for my bad English
Vinicius

Answer 1

There are many considerations here. I’m speaking about this because I have a similar issue. I’m currently using SQL to get the data from magento store to xml. Truely, using sql can make it faster ONLY if you know the attributes you’re fetching. eg. if your products have 15 attibutes, that means 50k x 15 attributes using sql. But at least you’ll be free from version issues because you’re using sql statements.

On the other hand…using models and API gives a lot of version issues especially if you’re developing for several magento versions. One other problem too is about magento custom attributes. Eg. If i add another attribute called ‘US SPECIAL SHIPPING’, It becomes quite difficult with the API.

If you don’t mind…you just make a direct sql call to all your attributes and save them to xml. That means you need very very fast machine to do this.

There is an extension on magento connect that serves comparison engines. It may fit your export neeeds. try it. price comparison script

<?php 

set_time_limit(3000);
ini_set('memory_limit', '-1');
include_once 'app/Mage.php';
umask(0);
Mage::app();
$products = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();
$products->addAttributeToSelect('*');
$products->load(); 
$baseUrl = Mage::getBaseUrl(Mage_Core_Model_Store::URL_TYPE_WEB);                       
    $output = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <products>';
if (count($products)): 

  foreach ($products as $id => $product):

  $url = $product->getProductUrl();
  $output .= '
  <product>
  <id>'. $product['entity_id'].'</id>
  <name><![CDATA['. $product['name'] .']]></name>
  <sku>'. $product['sku'] .'</sku>
  <description><![CDATA['. $product['description'] .']]></description>
  <shortdescription><![CDATA['. $product['short_description'] .']]></shortdescription>
  <price><![CDATA['. $product['price'] .']]></price>
  <minimalprice>'. $product['minimal_price'] .'</minimalprice>   
  <weight><![CDATA['. $product['weight'] .']]></weight>
  <categories><![CDATA['. $product['categories'] .']]></categories>
  <color><![CDATA['. $product['color'] .']]></color>
  <condition><![CDATA['. $product['condition'] .']]></condition>
  <availability><![CDATA['. $product['availability'] .']]></availability>
  <shipping><![CDATA['. $product['shipping'] .']]></shipping>
  <url><![CDATA['. $url.']]></url>
  <meta><![CDATA['. $product['meta_keyword'] .']]></meta>
  <metadescription><![CDATA['. $product['meta_description'] .']]></metadescription>
  <manufacturer><![CDATA['. $product['manufacturer'] .']]></manufacturer>
  <brand><![CDATA['. $product['brand'] .']]></brand>
  <upc><![CDATA['. $product['upc'] .']]></upc>
  <mpn><![CDATA['. $product['mpn'] .']]></mpn>
  <image><![CDATA['. $baseUrl ."media/catalog/product". $product['image'] .']]>        </image>';
  if (isset($attributes[$product['entity_id']])) {
  $output .= '
  <attributes>';  
  foreach ($attributes[$product['entity_id']] as $attribute => $values)
   $output .= '
    <attribute>
     <name>'. $attribute .'</name>
      <values>'.  join(', ', $values) . '</values>
     </attribute>';  
   $output .= '
 </attributes>';
  }

$output .= '
</product>';
endforeach;
endif;
header ("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=ISO-8859-1");
print $output .= '
 </products>'; 
?>