Recoverable Error: Object of class Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Attribute could not be converted to string

Question

I haven't had any problems but I moved to a new server and really haven't check it out for a while but now when I try to add a product to google shopping I get the following error:

Recoverable Error: Object of class Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Attribute could not be converted to string in /home/xxxxxxx/public_html/app/code/community/BlueVisionTec/GoogleShoppingApi/Model/Attribute/GoogleProductCategory.php on line 30

Here is the code the error is pointing to:

    public function convertAttribute($product, $shoppingProduct)
    {   
        // get category from product attribute
  -- line 30 here -->   Mage::log(__LINE__.$product->getResource()->getAttribute('google_shopping_category'));
        $value = $product->getResource()->getAttribute('google_shopping_category')
        ->getFrontend()->getValue($product);
        $value = preg_replace('/\d+ /','',$value);
        $shoppingProduct->setGoogleProductCategory($value);

        return $shoppingProduct;
    }

I've tried many things (mostly guesses) searched on Google and still can't seem to fix this error. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

$product->getResource()->getAttribute('google_shopping_category') returns an instance of Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Attribute and when you are doing this __LINE__.$product->getResource()->getAttribute('google_shopping_category') PHP tries to automatically convert the instance of Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Attribute to a string and it cannot do that.
An alternative would be to replace that with

$id = $product->getResource()->getAttribute('google_shopping_category')->getId();
Mage::log(__LINE__.$id);  

Or, of you need full details of the attribute you can try.

$attributeAsString = print_r($product->getResource()->getAttribute('google_shopping_category'), true);
Mage::log(__LINE__.$attributeAsString);