Get product attributes in collection

Question

I've got a big product collection about 68.000 items, when I loop through the collection I'm trying to get all attributes by using $collection->getAttributes() but it returns nothing.

When I load the products attributes like

$catId=604;
$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($catId)
    ->getProductCollection()
    ->addAttributeToSelect('*')
    ->addAttributeToFilter('category_id', $catId)
    ->addAttributeToFilter('type_id', 'simple')
    ->addAttributeToFilter('status', 1)->load();

foreach($collection as $col) {
    $prod = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($col->getId());
    $prod->getAttributes();
}

the performance is horrible so I want to get the attributes by using the collection but it doesn't work at all.

Any suggestions ?

Answer 1

You cannot call getAttributes() on $collection as this is the collection model/object. In your code example you are calling getAttributes() on $prod which is a product model/object.

You should remove the line $prod = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($col->getId()); which is causing a huge load because you are loading every individual product again while they were already loaded.

Just call $col->getAttributes(); right away.

By the way, as far as I can see, getAttributes() just returns all editable attributes of the product EAV model. So this array is the same for all of your 68.000 products (per attribute set that is). If you need all values in an array, just do $col->getData()