Get product type and category collections in magento

Question

I am creating a custom admin module. One of its tab, I need to add two dropdowns. One for selecting available product types in magento and another one for selecting available categories in magento. How can I achieve this? Please provide some hints for this.

I have searched a lot. But almost all results saying about getting product type and category according of a product that has loaded by an id. I dont want to load any products for this. Just want to get product type and category collections.

Please direct me properly. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can get the available product types like this:

Mage::getModel('catalog/product_type')->getOptionArray();

So if you want to use that in a select, you can create your select like this:

   $fieldset->addField('product_type', 'select', array(
        'label' => Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Product Type'),
        'title' => Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Product Type'),
        'name'  => 'type',
        'values'=> Mage::getModel('catalog/product_type')->getOptionArray()
    ));

To get the categories is a little trickier: you can do this:

$categories = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->getCollection()
    ->addAttributeToFilter('level', array('gt'=>0)); //this excludes the root of all roots. If you want to exclude the default category replace `'gt'=>0` with `'gt'=>1`.

Now put them in an array:

$arr = array();
foreach ($categories as $category){
    $arr[$category->getId()] = $category->getName();
}

and you can define the field :

$fieldset->addField('categoory_id', 'select', array(
    'label' => Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Category'),
    'title' => Mage::helper('catalog')->__('Category'),
    'name'  => 'category_id',
    'values'=> $arr
));