List all products in category, even disabled

Question

How can I show all products in a category, regardless of its status? I have a category that I want to show all products in the category, even it is disabled, invisible, out of stock, or whatever. I've made a new product/list.phtml template for this specific category and am overriding the Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_List to add a new method to accomplish this. In that method is this code

$catId = 432;  //for simplicity
$category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($catId);

return $category->getProductCollection()
    ->addAttributeToSelect('sku');

It is only retrieving enabled products. However, if I run the same code in a testing script (outside of catalog module) that loads Magento, I get all products that I'm looking for, enabled and disabled. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Please use this code

$productCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')

                        ->joinField('category_id', 'catalog/category_product', 'category_id', 'product_id=entity_id', null, 'left')
                        ->addAttributeToFilter('category_id', 3);
                       $productCollection->getSelect()->group('product_id')->distinct(true);
echo '<pre>'; print_r($productCollection->getData());

Definitely this work for you.

Answer 2

I got this working by doing two things:

1) Add ->setStoreId(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID) to the collection. collection::isEnabledFlat() returns false if the store is admin. However, it was still trying to pull from flat tables and was causing Magento to throw an error. The next step resolved this issue..

2) I had to set System > Configuration > Catalog > Frontend > Use Flat Catalog Product = No