Adding UPC in New Order Transactional Email template

Question

I've been trying to simply add the product field: UPC to new order transactional emails, in addition to SKU that's the default.

I'm pretty sure I found the template to make the modifications from another help article on making changes to the template. But can't find the right way to pull the actual UPC to show.

I'm making modifications to the template: /store/app/design/frontend/MYTHEME/default/template/email/order/items/order/default.phtml

The table cell next to SKU, I have tried all of the following calls for UPC:

<?php echo $_item->getUpc() 
<?php echo $_item->getData('upc') ?> 
<?php echo $this->getData('upc') ?>
<?php $this->getUpc($_item)  ?>

I'm pretty much just taking stabs at it, but didn't think it would be this difficult considering it's pretty much a key product field, if you want to use an additional code other than an internal SKU.

Help? Thanks

Answer 1

I recommend the observer approach foremost.

You can also use a collection instead of loading the product object. This will be less intensive and faster. I don't recommend this as a solution over Rinda's, but it is an alternative that you may not know about.

$upc = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection()
    ->addAttributeToSelect('upc') // only selecting what you want
    ->addAttributeToFilter('sku', $mySku) // filtering
    ->getFirstItem()
    ->getUpc();

Answer 2

The problem is that you're trying to get the data from the $_itemvariable, which is of type Mage_Sales_Model_Order_Item - and it does not exist on that model.

What you can do is to either add that attribute to the Mage_Sales_Model_Order_Item tables (see this thread for an example) or simply get the product represented by the order item and read the data from there.

That would look something like this:

$_productId = $_item->getProductId();
$_product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($_productId);
echo $_product->getUpc();

The drawback being that this way Magento will load the complete product model of each ordered item when sending that email, which is a quite expensive operation and will slow down the process a bit.

Hope that helps, regards