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magentorotten-tomatoes

Auto fill information for movie products in Magento

I'm working with Magento CE 1.6 in a project where we need an easy way to fill the movie info in DVDs and Blu-Rays products for a reseller ecommerce. I'm set to use the Rotten Tomatoes API wich seems very adequate for our purposes, but here's the thing: We don't want to have to input every single detail of the movie in the New Product dialog, oppositely, we want to fetch the info automatically using the movie name as hint (the API perfectly supports this). I though that we could achieve this by two means:

  1. Having the administrator to enter only the names of the movies and create and run periodically a script that fetches the rest of the info with the API and updates the data directly in the DB. I've been watching the DB changes when a product is saved and would'nt like to do that.

  2. Editing the Magento code to make the new product form auto fillable, maybe with ajax, once a movie name is entered. Zend framework isn't my strong and seems kind of hard too.

Am I seeing this problem from the rigth angle? Is there maybe another API? Or a Magento extension? Or another ecommerce?!

Solution

  • I would suggest a little different approach. Enhancing the Admin interface is difficult, but possible. Here is an easier way.

    Method #1 - Quick and Easy

    Create yourself a script that would go through a list of products. You can select them by attribute type, category, or even just select them all! Then, loop through that collection, and for each product, grab the title, query the movie API, and set the product's attributes. Then, save the product, and move to the next one. Something like this:

    Note: Be sure to create your custom attributes in the admin and assign them to the attribute set.

    <?php
require_once 'app/Mage.php';
umask(0);
Mage::app('default');

function getVideoDataFromAPI($title)
{
  // get your data from the API here...
  return $data;
}

$collection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')
  ->addAttributeToFilter('attribute_set_id', $yourAttributeSetId)
  ->addAttributeToFilter('year', ''); // <-- Set a field here that will be empty by default, and filled by the API. This is '' because it won't be null.

foreach ( $collection->getAllIds() as $id ) {
  $product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($id);
  $videoData = getVideoDataFromAPI($product->getName());
  if ( empty($videoData) ) { continue; }
  $product->setYear($videoData['year'])
    ->setRating($videoData['rating'])
    ->save();
}
?>

    Method #2 - Do the above, but in a custom extension

    I always like extensions over scripts. They are more secure and more powerful. With an extension you could have an admin list of the products, can filter them how ever you would like, and have a mass action to pull the video data manually. You could also set it up on a cron job to pull regularly.