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A Trick Hack To Conditionally Customize A Magento 2 jQuery Widget

Published: April 12, 2017

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Recently I’ve been working on porting Mpchadwick_SearchAutocompleteConfigmarator from Magento 1 to Magento 2. One of the module’s feature’s is a switch in the admin panel which allows you to turn off autocomplete. Rather than handling this in the controller, the module prevents the AJAX request from being dispatched entirely, which can be a big help from a scalability standpoint. In Magento 1 I used ifconfig to conditionally load a JavaScript file which mutated the Varien.searchForm prototype.

XML

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<layout>
    <default>
        <reference name="head">
            <action method="addItem" ifconfig="catalog/search/disable_autocomplete">
                <type>skin_js</type>
                <name>js/mpchadwick_searchautocompleteconfigmarator/disabler.js</name>
            </action>
        </reference>
    </default>
</layout>

JavaScript

if (typeof Varien.searchForm != 'undefined') {
    // Rather than modifying the controller, or block let's stop it here
    // so the request never even gets dispatched
    Varien.searchForm.addMethods({
        initAutocomplete : function(url, destinationElement) {
            return false;
        }
    })
}

In Magento 2, however, the frontend is very different.

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Magento 2 REST API Response Formats

Published: March 28, 2017

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The Magento 2 REST API can return responses in XML or JSON format. This is done based on the Accept HTTP Header. Per the developer documentation..

HTTP headers

Accept

Optional. Specifies the format of the response body. Default is JSON.

Accept: application/FORMAT

Where FORMAT is either JSON or XML.

If you omit this header, the response is returned in JSON format.

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/get-started/gs-web-api-request.html#http-headers

Here, I’ll dive into the code, to investigate how this works…

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Magento 2 REST API method return processing

Published: March 27, 2017

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If you’re getting started with the Magento 2 REST API you’ll find a good amount of resources documenting basic usage. Overall, it’s a big improvement over the Magento 1 REST API, in my opinion. However, one thing that I couldn’t find good information on is how Magento processes the result that your method returns.

As such, I spent a while digging through the code to understand. Here I’ll detail the (not exactly sane) way that Magento will process your method’s return value.

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Accessing the admin front name programmatically in Magento 2

Published: March 23, 2017

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Recently I was working on some Magento 2 code where I needed to programmatically determine the admin front name. If you run a Google search you’ll pretty quickly find the canonical answer for Magento 1…

Mage::getConfig()->getNode('admin/routers/adminhtml/args/frontName')

However, even after reading through two pages of Google results, I was not able to find an answer for Magento 2.

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Measuring round-trip time with nping

Published: March 21, 2017

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Recently, I was debugging a performance issue where a site was spending an above average amount of time running HGETs against a Redis instance. I came upon this snippet of text from Redis’ benchmarking documentation.

Network bandwidth and latency usually have a direct impact on the performance. It is a good practice to use the ping program to quickly check the latency between the client and server hosts is normal before launching the benchmark

https://redis.io/topics/benchmarks#factors-impacting-redis-performance

However when I went to ping the server running Redis I didn’t have much luck…

$ ping -c 10 -W 1 172.24.16.119
PING 172.24.16.119 (172.24.16.119) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 172.24.16.119 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 9999ms
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GROUP-ing a product collection the right way with groupByAttribute

Published: March 12, 2017

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Recently, I was reworking the implementation of a featured products widget which showed up on the home page. In order to show a variety of products we decided to GROUP BY manufacturer. This way only one product would show up per brand. The initial implementation looked something like this…

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

// Do some other logic

$collection->getSelect()->group('e.manufacturer_value')

This was working fine in dev (and production). However, when I merged some new code into the develop branch and deployed it to staging I started getting exceptions.

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