Question

I’m building a custom product import module for Magento and have never worked with Magento before in any regard.

I have a CSV file that contains all of the products. One of the columns contains the Category that the product should be assigned to separated by slashes. Ex:

Jewelry / Rings / Diamond
Jewelry / Neckless / Diamond

ect.

The problem I have is that the Diamond category can exist as a sub category in any number of parent categories. My solution was to break the path up (i.e. expload($categoryPath, “/”))

Using the first example (Jewelry / Rings / Diamond) I start at the stores root category and check to see if it contains a subcategory of Jewelry, if it does i get the ID of that subcategory and recursively make my way to the finish line, or at least that’s the theory.

The problem I’m running into is right here…

$rootCategory = Mage::getModel('catalog/category') -> load($rootCategoryId);
$currentCategory = $rootCategory -> getChildrenCategories() -> loadByAttribute('name', $targetCategoryName);

This throws me an error …”Call to a member function getName() on a non-object in”… I assume because getChildrenCategories() is returning a collection and i can not call loadByAttribute on it.

If this makes sense to anyone, please let me know how I can load a subcategory from the root category by using only the name. I was hoping that if loadByAttribute fails to load the category (because it does not exist) that it would return False and i can then create the category.

---

In response to Pavels suggestion i tryed :

$targetCategoryName = 'Jewelry';

$subCategories = $rootCategory
                    -> getChildrenCategories()
                    -> addAttributeToFilter('name',$targetCategoryName) 
                    -> setCurPage(1)
                    -> setPageSize(1)
                    -> load();

    $currentCategory = $subCategories
                    -> getFirstItem();

The name of $currentCategory is ‘dummy-category’. It would seem the filter is not working.

Answer 1

Based on your question, I think you need to find a category by name based on a parent category i.e. only search its children?

If so then…

$childCategoryName = 'Bedroom';
$parentCategoryId = 10;

$parentCategory = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($parentCategoryId);
$childCategory = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->getCollection()
    ->addAttributeToFilter('is_active', true)
    ->addIdFilter($parentCategory->getChildren())
    ->addAttributeToFilter('name', $childCategoryName)
    ->getFirstItem()    // Assuming your category names are unique ??
;

if (null !== $childCategory->getId()) {
    echo "Found Category: " . $childCategory->getData('name');
} else {
    echo "Category not found";
}

---

You were kind of on the right track with your original code:

$currentCategory = $rootCategory -> getChildrenCategories() -> loadByAttribute('name', $targetCategoryName);

The problem though is that $rootCategory->getChildrenCategories() returns a collection so you would need to filter this as opposed to loadByAttribute which would work against a model.

But, $rootCategory->getChildrenCategories() returns a loaded collection so you would still not be able to filter that unfortunately. Hence the code in my answer is slightly different – though same logic behind it.