Continue Shopping Button to category of product in same store view or same parent category

Question

There are answers all over the internet of how to alter the 'Continue Shopping' button to the last category.

However none of them take into consideration that the product may be in multiple categories or store views.

I've tried numerous ways to filter the below snippet to get the last category from either the current store or from a specific parent category, but nothing seems to work .

Any suggestions on how to refine the results further?

<?php
    $lastProductAddedToCartId = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getLastAddedProductId();
    if($lastProductAddedToCartId) {
        $productCategoryIdsArray = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($lastProductAddedToCartId)->getCategoryIds();
        $continueShoppingCategoryUrl = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($productCategoryIdsArray[0])->getUrl();
    }
?>

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12222601/make-magento-continue-shopping-button-redirect-to-the-last-added-to-cart-produ

Answer 1

Another approach to looking up the categories a product has is to store the url of the category a customer has last viewed into the session. This follows the assumption that most users would go to a category page > product page > cart.

An example of how to store and retrieve the url would be to add this to your catalog/category/view.phtml template

$currentUrl = $this->helper('core/url')->getCurrentUrl();
$session = Mage::getSingleton("core/session",  array("name"=>"frontend"));
$session->setData("last_category", $currentUrl);

Then on the cart page template (checkout/cart.phtml) you can retrieve the url like so:

$session = Mage::getSingleton("core/session",  array("name"=>"frontend"));
$lastUrl = $session->getData("last_category");

You may also want to take into account if they never visited a category page & provide fallbacks such as you stated in the question of using one of the categories of a last added product, or simply sending them back to the home page or a featured category page.

Update: To get the a category URL of the last added product from the same store you can compare the path to the root category ID of the store:

$lastProductAddedToCartId = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getLastAddedProductId();
$continueShoppingCategoryUrl = Mage::getBaseUrl();
if($lastProductAddedToCartId) {
    $productCategorys = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($lastProductAddedToCartId)->getCategoryCollection();
    $rootCatId = Mage::app()->getStore()->getRootCategoryId();
    foreach ($productCategorys as $category) {
        $regex = "/^[0-9]+\/". $rootCatId . "\/[0-9]+/";
        if(preg_match($regex, $category->getPath())){
            $continueShoppingCategoryUrl = $category->getUrl();
            break;
        }
    }
}