Calculate attribute dynamically in Magento

Question

I'm trying to work out if there is a way to integrate location based filtering into Magento catalog & search pages.

To place the above in context my use case is as follows: Products have latitude and longitude attributes as they are located around the country. What I want customers to be able to do is filter the products by location relative to their own location.

I've managed to successfully implement a custom search page to achieve the location search however it lacks all the other filter/search capabilities found in Magento. The ideal scenario is for the location to be a dynamically calculated variable however I'm unsure how to go about this, or if it's even viable in Magento.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Answer 1

For starters, you can try something like this:

1. create a product attribute distance_from_customer, default value 0, filterable in layered navigation
2. create an observer for event catalog_product_collection_load_after, which will change each product's distance_from_customer attribute in the loaded collection based on customer's location each time you load a product collection ( in category view for example )
3. extend the layered navigation to disable the sorting / filtering based on distance_from_customer if there is only one default value ( 0 )

In this solution distance_from_customer will always be 0 in the database, only will be changed in the product collection object before showing on frontend and the sorting / filtering option will be hidden if the application failed to get customer location data.