Variable name for category quantity

[HeleneWallis]

Is there a predefined variable name for the total number of products in a given category in the shopping cart? I need to tweak my usps.php code to prevent people from choosing a small flat rate box for quantities that won't fit in that. I've done this for specific product numbers and it works fine, but I now have six items in the affected category and I'd like to be able to exclude them without the program having to step through each product number one at a time. I've looked through the shopping_cart.php code but my brain is not finding it if it's in there anywhere.

[lat9]

There's no such value, to my knowledge.

[HeleneWallis]

Any advice on how to derive it? I guess I can create an array to hold product names that fall in the desired category and then add up those quantities. Better than enumerating each one of them. But I'm open to other suggestions.

[swguy]

A couple of options, but definitely do not use product name - that's a field that could change at any moment.

- Use product id
- Use master_category id for the whole category

[HeleneWallis]

Sorry, sloppy writing, I do use product id. I use master_category to exclude whole categories from some shipping options (small flat rate box being one of them). But this is a situation where any two products from one specific category would be okay, but not more than two. It looks like populating an array from the shopping cart for all products that match that category id, and then testing for total quantity greater than two is the way to go.

[swguy]

That's what I would do.

[lat9]

The shopping_cart class' get_products method, $_SESSION['cart']->get_products(), should give you the basics of what you need. It returns a numerically-indexed array of associative arrays (one per product variant in the cart).

Each of the associative arrays contains the category (e.g. $products[$i]['category']) that identifies the product's master category id. You could use that to determine how many items in that category are present in the cart.

[DrByte]

Try:

$_SESSION['cart']->in_cart_product_total_quantity_category($the_category_id_here)

[HeleneWallis]

Thanks, lat9 and DrByte. I'm not sure why, but I never saw your replies before. Didn't mean to ignore them.