CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmagento
gpcola
gpcola

Reputation: 1009

PHP/Magento - Variables within foreach not being updated properly

I'm having problems with a foreach loop in a magento template:

$cats = Mage::helper('catalog/category')->getStoreCategories();
foreach ($cats as $cat) {
    if($cat->getIsActive()&&$cat->getProductCount()) {
        echo "<div class=\"grid_6\">";
        echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('catalog/product_new')
            ->setTemplate('catalog/product/new.phtml')
            ->setCategoryId($cat->getId())
            ->setColumnCount(2)
            ->setBlockTitle("Just Added in <a href=".$cat->getUrl().">".$cat->getName()."</a>")
            ->toHtml();
        echo "</div>";
    }
}

Results in an identical block being repeated 4 times (I have 4 main categories) when it should show 4 different blocks, one for each category. It's as if the $cat->getId(), $cat->getName() and $cat->getUrl() statements are not being updated on each new iteration.

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks...

Upvotes: 3

Views: 860

Answers (2)

ColinM
ColinM

Reputation: 13936

You don't need to override the block, you can just disable caching for the block at render time by adding ->setCacheLifetime(NULL) right before ->toHtml(). If the containing block is already cached then there is probably no benefit to caching the child blocks anyway.

Upvotes: 0

Alana Storm
Alana Storm

Reputation: 166066

Just a guess here, but it looks like the catalog/product_new block wasn't designed to be used multiple times on one request. If you look at the class definition in Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_New, its pseudo-constructor includes the following

    $this->addData(array(
        'cache_lifetime'    => 86400,
        'cache_tags'        => array(Mage_Catalog_Model_Product::CACHE_TAG),
    ));

The presence of a cache_lifetime and cache_tags property are hints to Magento's Layout rendering system that this block should be cached.

So, what's happening is the first time you render the block, the results are cached. The next time you render the block, instead of re-rendering this the results are pulled out of cache.

My advice here would be to create a custom code module, write a new block class that extends the old block class and redefines either _construct or getCacheKeyInfo in a such a way that you're "allowed" to render the Block multiple times.

Upvotes: 7

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