Disabling programmatically the flat catalog category not working

Question

I have an import routine that needs to be run periodically to mass-import categories.

It processes a tree like structure of category data, and creates any categories that don't exist. The difficulty I face is that because flat catalog is enabled on the store, even after the category is created, it thinks it isn't as the index is set to manual.

I read to use the following when retrieving the category collection, to ensure the flat catalog is not used:

$categories = Mage::getModel('catalog/category', array('disable_flat' => true))
                    ->getCollection();

However, I can see that the returned resource is still a flat catalogue one - and my import again fails (it works if I disable the flat catalog in the admin area).

What can I do to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

I stumbled on the solution to the issue I was having. I had to change the line to the following:

$categories = Mage::getModel('catalog/category', array('disable_flat' => true))
                    ->getCollection()
                    ->setDisableFlat(true);

So, I added setDisableFlat(true) to the getModel('catalog/category') call - this then returned a catalog/category_collection instead of the catalog/category_flat_collection object.

If I removed array('disable_flat' => true) then I get the following error:

Call to undefined method 
Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Category_Flat_Collection::setDisableFlat()

I read about programmatically disabling the flat category catalog from several sources and not once was the above info provided, so whether this a version specific issue or not, hopefully someone will find this answer useful.