Can you apply a category rule programmatically?

Question

I've been using $product->getSpecialPrice() to build a custom price range on configurable products:

Hat $3.50-$10.00 special price $2.00-$8.00

This works fine on the product page (templates/catalog/view.phtml) as I'm updating it dynamically by pulling data from the json product object.

However, the getSpecialPrice() is not being picked up on the category pages:

Hat $3.50-$10.00 special price $0.00-$0.00

as getSpecialPrice() is returning null.

Is there a method to extract the price with the applied catalog rule?

thx

Answer 1

Edit the special_price attribute and set Used in product listing to Yes. Reindex and you will have the attribute available in product list.