join collection to get the customer name (for admin grid)

Question

I have a table for my custom module with following columns:

---------------
| custom_table|
---------------
| id
| seller_id
| buyer_id
| ...
---------------

seller_id -> customer_enity [entity_id]
buyer_id -> customer_entity [entity_id]

Now i would like to show the seller name and buyer name in admin grid layout. I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve the seller name and buyer name from the customer entities. But i know how to retrieve their emails as:

protected function _prepareCollection()
{
  $collection = Mage::getModel('custommodule/custommodule')->getCollection();  
  $collection->getSelect()
        ->join( array('ce1' => 'customer_entity'), 'ce1.entity_id=main_table.seller_id', array('seller_email' => 'email'))
        ->join( array('ce2' => 'customer_entity'), 'ce2.entity_id=main_table.buyer_id', array('buyer_email' => 'email'));
  #echo $collection->getSelect()->__toString();
  $this->setCollection($collection);
  return parent::_prepareCollection();
}

This above code works fine. But i want to display their names instead of email. Can any body help me to modify this collection?

Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

You need to join with customer_entity_varchar table where the name is store,
and the attribute_id = 5, 5 because it is the id of the attribute name in the table eav_attribute where all attributes are store
hope it help you