Get current product attribute before updating

[bigbridge-nl]

Get current product attribute before updating

[patrick-bigbridge]

Hi Alex,

I understand your use case, and I appreciate your effort to extend the library, but their are some reasons why I do not want to include the fetching of data (yet).

The most important reason is that fetching attribute data of many products can best be done in a single query. And sometimes you need multiple attributes. Then there are store views to consider. In short, the most efficient way of fetching data differs per use case.

Second, to fetch data of all kinds of product attributes and other aspects is a lot of work. Now we could start by just building what we need, but in order to make this extendible in the future, a new class tree would need to be set up. I don't want to clutter the Product class with fetch methods, it is too far outside of its responsibility.

And last, there is a perfectly good way to fetch some data directly from the database: direct database access. For example in http://blog.chapagain.com.np/magento-2-run-custom-sql-query/

To conclude, currently I am reluctant to include fetching data into the library. If, however, more people need such functionality and the same type of product data requests keep occurring, we could make a exception for some special cases. I would then suggest the class Api/Information for this.

[haelbichalex]

For anyone interested: I dealt with my issue by creating a new class and using the Magento2DbConnection provided by this project (because why not).

/**
 * @param \BigBridge\ProductImport\Model\Persistence\Magento2DbConnection $dbConnection
 */
public function __construct(
    \BigBridge\ProductImport\Model\Persistence\Magento2DbConnection $dbConnection
) {
    $this->dbConnection = $dbConnection;
}

And here I fetch the attributes value:

$this->dbConnection->fetchSingleCell("
    SELECT `value`
    FROM `catalog_product_entity_varchar`
    WHERE `attribute_id` = {$attributeId} AND `entity_id` = {$this->productId}
");

This either returns my desired value or null, what tells me I need to do an update.