Product collection displaying wrong category

Question

I am currently working on creating a product slider for promotional products.

I have created a new category within Magento called "Promotional" (ID = 497), and have assigned 8 products to it.

My issue is that my code (below) is displaying products from the wrong category and not the newly created "Promotional" category.

category-slider.phtml

<?php
$_products = $this->getLoadedProductCollection();
$_helper = $this->helper('catalog/output');

if ($_products->getSize()):
    echo $_products->getSize(); 

    foreach ($_products as $_product): 

        echo $_helper->productAttribute($_product, $_product->getName(), 'name');

        echo "<pre>";
        print_r( $_product->debug() );
        echo "</pre>";

    endforeach; 
endif; 

Home page > Design

<reference name="footer_before">
    <block type="catalog/product_list" name="categoryslider" template="mytheme/page/html/sliders/category-slider.phtml" after="-">
        <action method="setCategory"><category_id>497</category_id></action>
    </block>
</reference>

I have tried reindexing as well as clearing all caches (they are all disabled anyway), yet products in a different category are being shown.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

To me you should use setCategoryId instead of setCategory

The reason behind that is that the Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List's _getProductCollection method is using the following code to load the category:

        if ($this->getCategoryId()) {
            $category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($this->getCategoryId());
            if ($category->getId()) {
                $origCategory = $layer->getCurrentCategory();
                $layer->setCurrentCategory($category);
                $this->addModelTags($category);
            }
        }