php - Magento - load only configurable products

Question

I have the following code:

$_productCollection = $this->getLoadedProductCollection();

foreach ($_productCollection as $_product)
{
  if ($_product->_data['type_id'] == 'configurable')
  {
    ...
  } 
}

While it does what it's supposed to do, it greatly slows down page load time. Is it possible to load only configurable products and remove the check for 'configurable'? The store has 12000 products, about 700 are configurable and the rest are child simple products.

I found the following code which returns all configurable products. I need only the products within the current category:

$collectionConfigurable = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_collection')
                ->addAttributeToFilter('type_id', array('eq' => 'configurable'));

Answer 1

The problem with getLoadedProductCollection() is it's already loaded - the products' data has already been retrieved from the database. Just using the current category's product collection isn't good enough either, that will ignore the "layers" (attribute filters). The trick is to remove the loaded products from the list first.

// First make a copy, otherwise the rest of the page might be affected!
$_productCollection = clone $this->getLoadedProductCollection();
// Unset the current products and filter before loading the next.
$_productCollection->clear()
                   ->addAttributeToFilter('type_id', 'configurable')
                   ->load();

print_r($_productCollection) has it's issues too, you're not just outputting the products but also all details of the resource that is the database connection, and cached values, and the products' individual resources, and so on...

In this case I think you would be happier with:

print_r($_productCollection->toArray())