Selecting a single, random product from a collection in Magento

I was recently working on a site where a “featured” product was required on the homepage. Rather than just making this a category, or a specific product, I wanted to give as much flexibilty as possible, and also allow them some extra functionality.

So, I created a new attribute, “homepage_product” – a boolean. This attribute can be assigned to any product. So, what if there are 10 products selected? I only have room for one. I needed to get a random product from the list of products that had this attribute selected.

I guess I could have read all the products into an array, and then used rand() to grab a random product from that array, but that seemed to provide an over-head, and seemed too complicated for something that should surely be able to be done in Magento.

So, I came up with this:

// get products tagged with homepage_product
$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection()
        ->addFieldToFilter(array(
                array('attribute'=>'homepage_product','eq'=>'1'),
        ))
        ->addStoreFilter();
$collection->getSelect()->order(new Zend_Db_Expr('RAND()'));
$numProducts = 1;
$collection->setPage(1, $numProducts)->load();

foreach($collection as $homepageProduct) {
    $homepageProductInformation = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($homepageProduct->getEntityId());
}
?>

// get products tagged with homepage_product

$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection()

->addFieldToFilter(array(

array('attribute'=>'homepage_product','eq'=>'1'),

))

->addStoreFilter();

$collection->getSelect()->order(new Zend_Db_Expr('RAND()'));

$numProducts = 1;

$collection->setPage(1, $numProducts)->load();

foreach($collection as $homepageProduct) {

$homepageProductInformation = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($homepageProduct->getEntityId());

}

Image Credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

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