Faster Way to Assign Products to Categories

Question

In Magento there is a great model Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Action which allows you to quickly update product attributes. You just pass it the IDs that the change should apply to, and an array of key/value pairs for attribute-code/value.

I was able to easily copy this and create Mage_Catalog_Model_Category_Action (along with Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Category_Action and Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Category_Action). It just required changing the entity type to 'catalog_category' in a few places, (plus changing a view event names,) and it works great.

The problem though is that a category's list of product IDs isn't an attribute. Though there is a catalog_category_product table, there is no matching entity type, or even a model (!?) for this table.

So I'm left wondering how I can mass-update the category to product association. Obviously I could load each product via it's model, and update the 'category_ids' attribute, but this involves a ton of overhead. (I should note, I'm looking to be able to mass update thousands of category->product associations.)

The only method left available to me is direct query manipulation, and I'm hoping to avoid that.

I do know that the API has an assignProducts method, but I don't want to make thousands of SOAP calls back to my own server, and I'm not sure how to use the API models directly in my code.

Any help appreciated.

Edit: The class Mage_Catalog_Model_Category_Indexer_Product and method _registerProductEvent and/or _registerCategoryEvent might hold some clues. However these are protected methods and I'm not sure how to build or spoof the Mage_Index_Model_Event object correctly.

Answer 1

the fastest way is with direct queries. And there shouldn't be an issue with that. I've done it a lot of times. The only thing required is to rebuild the indexes when you are done.

INSERT INTO `catalog_category_product` SET
    `category_id` = category id here
    `product_id` = product id here
    `position` = position here
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
    `position` = position here

but if you want to avoid this you can group your product ids by category then do this:

$category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load(category id here);
$postedProducts = $category->getProductsPosition();
foreach ($productIds as $productId) {
    $postedProducts[$productId] = position here;
}
$category->setPostedProducts($postedProducts);
$category->save();