How to check if a collection has items?

Question

What does a product that is not found return in terms of Object?

I'm loading a product like the following:

$man_collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')
    ->load($mProduct)
    ->getProductCollection()
    ->addAttributeToSelect('*')
    ->addAttributeToFilter('status', 1)
    ->addAttributeToFilter('visibility', 4)
    // ->getSelect()->limit(1);
    ->addFieldToFilter(array(
        array('attribute' => 'color', 'eq' => '1049')
    ));

Assuming that this specific product with this color code 1049 does not exist in the database, how can I validate it? If I try

gettype($man_collection)

it still returns Object. So is there a way to validate this? Like "if product with color code 1049 found proceed, else echo not found"

Answer 1

You can check the size of your collection:

if ($man_collection->getSize()) {
    //proceed
} else {
    echo "not found";
}

Explaination here: Difference between getSize() and count() on collection

---

Edit: tested for 750 products

$collection->getData()

• Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 67,567 microsecs
• Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 67,599 microsecs
• Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 11,719,168 bytes
• Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 11,648,152 bytes
• Number of Function Calls: 1,047

$collection->getSize()

• Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 6,371 microsecs
• Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 4,402 microsecs
• Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 140,816 bytes
• Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 96,000 bytes
• Number of Function Calls: 191

$collection->count() or sizeof($collection)

• Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 2,130,568 microsecs
• Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 2,080,617 microsecs
• Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 12,899,872 bytes
• Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 13,002,256 bytes
• Number of Function Calls: 101,073

Answer 2

To answer your question to why you still get the response as an object even if the collection does not contain any products...
A product collection is an object by itself. It contains a lot of things other than an array (not really an array) of products.
It contains references to the tables involved in the query, the query, db connection and a lot others.

Answer 3

You can try this-

if($man_collection->Count())
{
   //products found
}
else
{
   // products not found
}

Answer 4

Got it.!

It is:

if($man_collection->getData())