Bug in Magento 1.6.1.0/1.6.2.0 affecting development sites using base_url

I installed a copy of Magento 1.6.1.0 on a dev site I setup to do some testing with Varnish with (more on that later). However, in the requirement to be able to get to Magento using 2 different URL’s, I stumbled across this quite annoying bug.

a:5:{i:0;s:67:"Illegal scheme supplied, only alphanumeric characters are permitted";i:1;s:729:"#0 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Store.php(712): Zend_Uri::factory('{{base_url}}')
#1 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php(313): Mage_Core_Model_Store->isCurrentlySecure()
#2 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php(161): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Front->_checkBaseUrl(Object(Mage_Core_Controller_Request_Http))
#3 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php(349): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Front->dispatch()
#4 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/app/Mage.php(640): Mage_Core_Model_App->run(Array)
#5 /home/dan/workspace/magento1610/index.php(80): Mage::run('', 'store')
#6 {main}";s:3:"url";s:85:"/index.php/admin/system_config/edit/section/web/key/41c8c3d3f4bcb72e3c267ae0b73333d7/";s:11:"script_name";s:10:"/index.php";s:4:"skin";s:7:"default";}

Bug reports on Magento’s site here, here, here and here. Not being patient enough for Varien to fix it, I developed a small extension which resolves the problem. It’s available to download below.

Put the tarball in the Magento webroot and extract. After you install this extension, you’ll need to empty the cache manually (if it was enabled). I assume if you’re reading this, then your Magento installation is broken. To do this, simply remove the contents of var/cache in Magento’s webroot.

When you re-visit your Magento’s front or backend, the problem should vanish.

[download id=”24″ format=”7″]

Updated 9th January 2012: It apparent that, attempting to login before applying this update with {{base_url}} set screws up the admin login cookies somehow. When you apply this patch, you’ll probably need to empty out your chosen browser’s cookie jar before attempting to login. You can tell if you need to or not by trying to login, and Magento coming back to you with a login screen, with no failed login message.

Updated 12th January 2012: Magento 1.6.2.0 was released today. I can confirm that this problem still exists and has not yet been fixed (despite what the developers have written on one of the bug reports).

Updated 25th April 2012: I can confirm that this problem has been resolved in the latest 1.7.0.0 version, released 24th April 2012.

Getting Configurable Product from Simple Product ID in Magento 1.5+

I recently stumbled across a hurdle which stopped some of my code from working. It was code that gets the configurable product associated with a given simple product. Many solutions out there call a “loadParentProductIds()” function within the Mage_Catalog_Model_Product class. However, as of Magento 1.4.2.0, they deprecated this method, simply by setting the data element (and returning) an empty array. So any calls to this function would return/yield no parents. Hm, how to get the parent product now?

Finally, I managed to find a workable solution. Check this out;

$simpleProductId = 465;
$parentIds = Mage::getResourceSingleton('catalog/product_type_configurable')
                  ->getParentIdsByChild($simpleProductId);
$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($parentIds[0]);
echo $product->getId(); // ID = 462 (aka, Parent of 465)

There you have it. Short and sweet.

Adding multiple products to the cart simultaneously in Magento (Part 2)

A while ago I wrote about adding multiple products to the shopping cart simultaneously. It turns out this seems to have stopped working from Magento 1.4 or so. Up until now, I’ve not really had the time to look in detail to figure out why. Finally, this evening, I got some time. So I dug deeper.

It turns out there seems to have been some changes in the way models persist their data, and unsetting and unloading/resetting them didn’t seem to cut it any more. Anyway, below is a fixed version of the previous post. Tested on 1.4.2.0 and 1.6.0.0.

This is a replacement for the file app/code/local/BTS/AddMultipleProducts/controllers/AddController.php;

getRequest()->getParam('products'));
        $cart = Mage::getModel('checkout/cart');
        $cart->init();
        /* @var $pModel Mage_Catalog_Model_Product */
        foreach ($products as $product_id) {
            if ($product_id == '') {
                continue;
            }
            $pModel = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product_id);
            if ($pModel->getTypeId() == Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Type::TYPE_SIMPLE) {
                try {
                    $cart->addProduct($pModel, array('qty' => '1'));
                }
                catch (Exception $e) {
                    continue;
                }
            }
        }
        $cart->save();
        if ($this->getRequest()->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
            exit('1');
        }
        $this->_redirect('checkout/cart');
    }

}

Amazon EC2 Elastic Load Balancer limit

If, like us, you’re running a shared hosting platform on Amazon EC2, and have many clients requiring SSL certificates, you’ll probably be using Elastic Load Balancers to do the SSL termination for you, since you can’t have multiple Elastic IP’s associated with a single instance.

However, when you reach either 5 or 10 ELB’s, you’ll be greeted with this error message when trying to create another one:

Error: TooManyLoadBalancers: undefined

Amazon define relatively low quotas for new AWS accounts, which are usually fine for most users. However, some use cases apply where you need these limits to be increased. The problem with the ELB limit, is that there’s not very much documentation explaining that there is a limit, nor how to request to increase it. The answer lies hidden away here on Amazon’s AWS site. This is the form you need to fill in to request an increase on the account’s ELB limit.

Adding new attribute to Customer Account in Magento

I recently discovered that this is a right pig to get going. There’s plenty of “solutions” on the interwebs. Many seemingly either don’t work, don’t work as expected, or are complete hacks which makes your extension not modular (i.e; by executing the “addAttribute” function within a template, then removing it once it’s done).

Here’s how I did it. Continue reading “Adding new attribute to Customer Account in Magento” »

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