Share programmatically created wishlist

Question

I have a custom admin module where I want to programatically create and share a wishlist.

I managed to create it programatically and to send the email (it arrives ok), but the "$wishlistBlock" and therefore, the email is empty.

I'm not such advanced in Magento yet, do I have to rewrite the model/modelresource/block or something like to get it working in my custom module? Tried a lot of different things, none worked.

This is the offending piece of code:

                    $wishlist = Mage::getModel('wishlist/wishlist')->loadByCustomer($customerId, true);

                    foreach($products as $product) {
                        $product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product->getId());
                        $buyRequest = new Varien_Object(array()); // any possible options that are configurable and you want to save with the product
                        $result = $wishlist->addNewItem($product, $buyRequest);
                    }

                    Mage::helper('wishlist')->calculate();

                    $message = "";
                    $emailModel = Mage::getModel('core/email_template');
                    $sharingCode = $wishlist->getSharingCode();
                    //this var returning empty
                    $wishlistBlock = Mage::getSingleton('core/layout')->createBlock('wishlist/share_email_items')->toHtml();

                    $emailModel->sendTransactional(
                        Mage::getStoreConfig('wishlist/email/email_template'),
                        Mage::getStoreConfig('wishlist/email/email_identity'),
                        $email,
                        null,
                        array(
                            'customer'       => $customer,
                            'salable'        => $wishlist->isSalable() ? 'yes' : '',
                            'items'          => $wishlistBlock,
                            'addAllLink'     => Mage::getUrl('*/shared/allcart', array('code' => $sharingCode)),
                            'viewOnSiteLink' => Mage::getUrl('*/shared/index', array('code' => $sharingCode)),
                            'message'        => $message
                        )
                    );

                    $wishlist->setShared(1);
                    $wishlist->save();

                    Mage::dispatchEvent('wishlist_share', array('wishlist' => $wishlist));
                    Mage::getSingleton('adminhtml/session')->addSuccess(
                        $this->__('Your Wishlist has been shared.')
                    );

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Ok so as this is done from an admin controller the first thing to do is to change the area before rendering the block so the frontend template is getting used.

To do so:

$block = Mage::getSingleton('core/layout')->createBlock('wishlist/share_email_items');
$block->setData('area','frontend')->toHtml();

Second part, which is minor but for some reasons in sh4 code, the wishlist object was not registered, so we had to register it manually by adding the following line before rendering the block:

Mage::register('wishlist',$wishlist);