Overriding Magento Save method

Question

We have a attribute 'short-description' in our product listing page. We want to escape html characters e.g. "&" => "&" , and append information to it when our admin hit 'save' in product editing page. Which file / method should I be looking into?

Answer 1

You shouldn't override the save method.
Use an observer.
You can observe the event catalog_product_save_before.
Your method could look like this:

public function catalogProductSaveBefore($observer) {
    $product = $observer->getEvent()->getProduct();
    $shortDescription = $product->getShortDescription();
    $shortDescription = ...process your short description here
    $product->setShortDescription($shortDescription); 
    Mage::getSingleton('adminhtml/session')->addNotice('your message for admin here');
}

Read more about how event observers work in here.

Answer 2

You can start to debug from Mage_Adminhtml_Catalog_ProductController::saveAction(). This method holds product saving action. So you need to rewrite this controller file

File : app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/controller/Catalog/ProductController.php

public function saveAction()
{
     $short_descr = $this->getRequest()->getParam('shor_description');
     if ($short_descr != '') {
         //do something with it
     }
}

Hope it helps