A way to get Category objects (not array) without SQL?

[stratboy]

Hi, I was wandering, is there a way to have a list of category objects instead of arrays (like Category::getCategories() does)? I know I can do an sql query, but it sounds strange to me that there's no method to have an object list instead of an array list. Probably I'm missing something.

 

Also, when I get the category list, I got also Home and Root, that often are quite useless. A way to have a list without them (so that I fon't have to 'clean' the resulting default array).

 

Thank you!

[stratboy]

Too tech?

Anyway, found a partial answer by myself. Basically, I needed it to build a custom menu, and I needed a tree of category objects.

I've found that the Category class has a method named recurseLiteCategTree() that help a lot. It returns an array that contains a tree of arrays with id, link, name, description and children of each found category, accordingly with the passed parameters.

 

So, for example, say I want all the category tree starting from the Home Page (that ususually has id == 2);

 

$root = new Category(2);
$tree = $root->recurseLiteCategTree();

 

The method firm is like this:

 

recurseLiteCategTree($max_depth = 3, $current_depth = 0, $id_lang = null, $excluded_ids_array = null)

 

So as you can see, it's still possible go ahead and further refine the tree.

 

Still it's not a tree filled with real Category instances, but it's anyway really usefull. And one can always tweak it by overriding the Category class. It's quite simple. Hope it helps.

Edited July 11, 2013 by stratboy (see edit history)