Getting Product list by category - not returning anything

Question

So like alot of other people, im building my first Magento custom module - and im trying to make a list of the products in my store. I have worked most of it out by now, but im having a problem when im trying to retrieve the data from my database.

I have googled to my skin starter to fall off, and i have read (and tried) most of the suggestions on stackoverflow - from older posts.

my current Model class looks like this:

public function getRecentProducts()
{
    $categoryID = 4;
    $category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($categoryID);
    $productCollection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')
        ->addCategoryFilter($category);
    //$test = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
    // ->getCollection->()addAttributeToSelect('*');       
    return $products;
}

I checked to make sure i get the correct category with xdebug, and its defently the category im looking for - but sadly thats where it stops to work :( No matter what i try, when i try to retreieve products it returns the array with _data = Null (using the //$test returns exactly the same

I hope somebody can help me, because im about to go crazy from this

P.s i reindexed all the index's, and tried to delete the caches aswell - neither helps

Answer 1

Can you find the product ids in the catalog_category_product table? What does the select statement look like?

It should be: SELECT e.*, cat_pro.position AS cat_index_position FROM catalog_product_entity AS e INNER JOIN catalog_category_product AS cat_pro ON cat_pro.product_id=e.entity_id AND cat_pro.category_id='x'

(x = cat id)