How to get first item from product collection

Question

On the category view.phtml if I get the category and then get a product collection, how can I get the first product form the collection assigned to $_product for use in the code? Here is what I have:

$_category   = $this->getCurrentCategory();
$_collection = $_category->getProductCollection();
$_product    = 
$_resource   = $_product->getResource();

I tried using foreach but kept getting errors.

Answer 1

To get the first item in a collection simply use the getFirstItem() function on the collection.

Example:

// this gets all the products
$productCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/products_collection');
// this line gets just the first product
$firstItem = $productCollection->getFirstItem(); 

Example 2 (for this particular question):

$_category  = $this->getCurrentCategory();
$_collection = $_category->getProductCollection();
$_product =  $_collection->getFirstItem(); // this will get first item in collection

Some other areas this can be used:

Customers

$customerCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('customer/customer_collection');
$firstCustomer = $customerCollection->getFirstItem();

Orders

$orderCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('sales/order_collection');
$firstOrder = $orderCollection->getFirstItem();

Please Note:

Its not a good idea to load ALL the products/customers/orders for this takes a lot of resources. The preferred way is to limit what you want to load by using the addAttributeToFilter() or addFieldToFilter() functions, see example below:

$productCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')
                           ->addAttributeToFilter('sku', 'book123`);

Answer 2

pzirkind is totally correct, just wondering that nobody takes care about performance. If you ONLY want the first/last item of a collection, you should always limit your query to 1:

$collection->getSelect()->limit(1);

Just using getFirstItem() will still loads the whole collection and after that it grags the first item.

---

Example: category with 750 products

$category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load(41);
$collection = $category->getProductCollection();
# $collection->getSelect()->limit(1);
var_dump($collection->getSelect()->__toString());
var_dump($collection->getFirstItem()->getData());

Just getFirstItem():

• Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 2,318,497 microsecs
• Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 2,000,604 microsecs
• Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 7,729,776 bytes
• Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 7,977,672 bytes
• Number of Function Calls: 96,957

Adding getSelect()->limit(1):

• Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 424,955 microsecs
• Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 380,326 microsecs
• Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 4,043,728 bytes
• Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 3,976,000 bytes
• Number of Function Calls: 15,249

Answer 3

var_dump($_collection->getFirstItem()->getData());
echo $_collection->getFirstItem()->getName();

Also how to get Last Item:

echo $_collection->getLastItem()->getName();
var_dump($_collection->getLastItem()->getData()); 

Answer 4

@pZirKind is right you can get the first item from the products collection using the native methods of Varien Collection class like:

$_category  = $this->getCurrentCategory();

$_collection = $_category->getProductCollection();

$_product = $_collection->getFirstItem()

Answer 5

$Collection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/products_collection');
$firstItem = $Collection->getFirstItem(); 

Answer 6

Try this please

    $_category  = $this->getCurrentCategory();        
    $_collection = $_category->getProductCollection();        
    $_items = $_productCollection->getItems(); 
   if($_items){  
    $_items[0]->getShortName();
    $_items[0]->getProductUrl();
   }