Possible to index multiple products at a time? (Not all products at a time, not one at a time)

Question

Back in Magento 1.3x there was a programatic way to kick off the index processing for a list of products. But somewhere between 1.3.x and 1.6.x Magento's indexing code was refactored and I can't figure out how to get that same functionality.

It seems that in CE 1.6+ we have the option of kicking off an indexing process for all products, or we have the option to kick off the indexing process for a single product. But I have a list of products (ten to a couple hundred) that I want to reindex, but I don't want to run them individually if possible.

If it makes a difference, I am only interested in the pricing index process.

Answer 1

I think there is. I started looking to see what happens when you select multiple products in the grid and bulk change attributes. In this method Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Action::updateAttributes() some reindex event is registered.

Mage::getSingleton('index/indexer')->processEntityAction(
    $this, Mage_Catalog_Model_Product::ENTITY, Mage_Index_Model_Event::TYPE_MASS_ACTION
);

After digging deeper I ended up in this method for reindexing prices: Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Product_Indexer_Price::catalogProductMassAction(). So if you want to trigger a price reindexing process just for a few products you can call this method in your code.

Tip: if you are trying to reindex more than 30% of your products it will trigger 'reindex all prices' process. (I'm really curious on who came up with this 30% and how).