Cecko's Lab

This morning I was looking for some new and interesting articles and I found one titled Are You Giving Your Users Positive Feedback? In this article I’ve found one very simple and elegant solution of something that always bothered me while shopping online. As I’m impatient person I always have problems with clicking more than once on the add to cart button and few times I’ve purchased items in bigger quantity that I’ve intended. I’ve never seen a web shop, that offers this simple solution presented in the article I’ve read – adding message for items that are already in the shopping cart.

After short search for existing modules or extensions I’ve decided to see how this can be done in Magento and if it’s too difficult to implement. With little brainstorming in The Lab it turned out that task is not difficult at all and we’ve decided to share the code with you.

We’ve created small module containing only three files:

The first one is our module XML file and it’s located in app/etc/modules. The filename we choose is CeckosLab_SmartView.xml. The file contains following code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

	
		
			true
			local
		
	

The second one is app/code/local/CeckosLab/SmartView/etc/config.xml In our module this file contains module information and helper’s class that we’re using. The code is shown below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

	
		
			1.0.0
		
	
	
		
			
				CeckosLab_SmartView_Helper
			
		
	

The third file is the heart of the module which in our case is just one simple helper. The file is locate in app/code/local/CeckosLab/SmartView/Helper and is named Data.php It contains constructor and two public methods. In the constructor we get the ID and the quantity of each product in the shopping cart and keep them as array in the member variable $_cartProductIds. The method isInCart() accepts as parameter object from class Mage_Catalog_Model_Product and returns true if the Product ID exists in the member variable $_cartProductIds. The function getQty() can be called to return the product’s quantity in your cart. The code of the helper is shown below:

class CeckosLab_SmartView_Helper_Data extends Mage_Core_Helper_Abstract
{
    protected $_cartProductIds;


    public function __construct() {
        $product_ids = array();
        $products = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getQuote()->getAllVisibleItems();
        foreach ($products as $_products){
            $product_ids [$_products->getProductId()] = $_products->getQty();
        }
        $this->_cartProductIds = $product_ids;
    }
    
    public function isInCart($product) {
        return array_key_exists($product->getId(), $this->_cartProductIds); 
    }
    
    public function getQty($product) {
        return  $this->_cartProductIds [$product->getId()]; 
    }

You can find our small module on GitHub and get it for free: https://github.com/ceckoslab/smart_view

After you have all three files in their proper locations all you need to do is to add few short lines of code. You need to do this in the template file app/design/frontend/yourpackage/yourtheme/template/catalog/product/list.phtml for both list and grid view. If the file does not exists in your theme copy it form the base theme and add the code there.

The first piece of code that needs to be added is call to our helper class.

    $_cartItemsHelper = Mage::helper('smartview');

The the second piece of code is repeated twice – once for the list view mode and once for the grid view mode. The code contains calls to both functions in our helper class. The code below is just an example usage – it will display short message right after the product name if the item is already in the cart.

	
		<?php echo $_helper->productAttribute($_product, $_product->getName() , 'name'); ?>
	


<?php if ($_cartItemsHelper->isInCart($_product)): ?>
	<?php echo $_cartItemsHelper->getQty($_product); ?> item(s) already in your cart
<?php endif; ?>

The expected results are shown on the screens below:

Well there is some room for improovements:

It will be great if we use custom DB query instead of Mage::getSingleton(‘checkout/session’)->getQuote()->getAllVisibleItems() with having in mind to fetch only the product ID and the quantity instead of fetching all the properties of Mage_Sales_Model_Quote_Item . In this way we will save some server resources and will decrease the load time.

All that’s left to do is to change the text and style it in order to blend in your design. Enjoy

References:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11670419/how-to-check-if-product-is-already-added-in-cart-or-not
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/07/17/are-giving-users-positive-feedback

Tags: cart, magento, product, usability

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2012 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Magento. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.