Prattski | Magento & Web Development

If you are utilizing Magento’s API and have checked out the documentation, you’ll see that they have included a V2 of their soap API saying:

As of v1.3 you may also use http://yourmagentohost/api/v2_soap?wsdl=1 which has been added to improve compatbility with Java and .NET.

If you find the need to utilize the v2_soap API, take note that you will need to call your methods differently than the documentation explains.

For example, if you would like to use the sales_order.info method, using the standard soap API, you would do the following to get all the order info for order number 1000000142:

$client = new SoapClient('http://yourwebsite.com/api/soap/?wsdl');
$session = $client->login('username', 'password');
$result = $client->call($session, 'sales_order.info', '1000000142');

If you need to use the V2 API, you need to so it slightly different. Instead of using the call() method, you call the specific API method instead:

$client = new SoapClient('http://yourwebsite.com/api/soap/?wsdl');
$session = $client->login('username', 'password');
$result = $client->salesOrderInfo($session, '1000000142');

So, for V2, you must convert the method names in the Magento documentation to a camel-case method name.

I’m making another Magento extension available for free via Github. This module provides an easy interface to import/export Custom URL rewrites. As of the current version, please note that it does not import/export System rewrites.

https://github.com/Prattski/import-rewrites

If you are using 1.5.x+: Being that I developed this module on 1.4.x, the current package that you can download from Github will not work to install via the mage script. I would have to manually install it on 1.5 and then re-package it so that it’s a Magento Connect 2.0 package instead of a 1.0 package.

If you want to use this module, you’ll have to just unpackage it yourself. Inside, you’ll find 3 directories:

• adminhtml – open it up, and copy the adminhtml/default/prattski/ directory into app/design/adminhtml/default/
• modules – open it up and put Prattski_ImportRewrites.xml into app/etc/modules/
• Prattski – put in app/code/community/

When creating a module (extension) in Magento, if you are doing anything at all with design or skin files, you know that there’s no way to put those files within your main module directory. If you are like me, you don’t like that fact. I wish my module could all be housed inside one directory, but at this point it can’t. To help with this, I typically create a text file withing the root of my module’s directory like this: app/code/local/Prattski/MyModule/externalfiles.txt

Here I list out every file and it’s path that does not reside in my module directory. This not only helps you not forget what files belong to the module, but also make it easy to remove everything should you need to fully uninstall it. Here is an example:

### Module Files Outside this Directory
 
# Module XML File
app/etc/modules/Prattski_MyModule.xml
 
# Frontend Templates
app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/mymodule.xml
app/design/frontend/base/default/template/mymodule/file1.phtml
app/design/frontend/base/default/template/mymodule/file2.phtml
 
# Skin Files
skin/frontend/base/default/css/mymodule.css

I would encourage everyone who writes modules to get in this habit. It is not only very useful for yourself, it is also really helpful for any of you creating community extensions to include this so that whoever is installing the files can easily see all that belongs to the module if any modifications need to happen.

Note: Only tested so far with 1.4.1.1.

A client that I am working on has a custom product attribute, which is a date field. They recently ran an import to update that field and noticed something strange. It seems that some of the dates worked fine, and others had the day and the month swapped, creating a wrong date.

They had probably 50+ products with the following value for the date: “2011-05-10 00:00:00″. Some of them worked properly and the date ’5/10/11′ displays when editing the product in the admin. But, some of them switched the day and month and the date in the field is ’10/5/11′.

I tried reversing the day and month in the csv and imported again, and again, it switched the date around. So, now that the value in the admin was ’5/10/11′, I ran an export of just that product, and the date was correct! I took that exact spreadsheet and imported it, and it switched the day and month again.

At this point, I don’t have time to really dig into trying to figure out the issue. If you have encountered this, or even better if you have figured out the issue, please comment! Please be sure to inclue your Magento version as well, as it may not just be 1.4.1.1.