Can't load all products in Indexcontroller

Question

I have a simple Indexcontroller.

When I use this:

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

It doesn't show all the product (just a few), what could the reason for this be? I would like to load all products, doesn't matter what the status is.

UPDATE: Thanks to Alan Storm I found the answer. In using: echo (string) $collection->getSelect(); I saw: (_table_name.store_id = 5)

By setting it to storeId 0 ('admin' so to say) I was able to see all the product.

Sounds logical... as always :-)

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there's too many reasons to list (or to even know) why your product collection may not be returning all the products you think it should. It may be a bug, may be an extension you installed, or may be you have a misunderstanding as to what's returned in a default collection.

Fortunately, this is a relatively simple thing to debug yourself. You can take a peek at the SELECT statement used by the collection to populate its initial objects.

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

echo (string) $collection->getSelect();  

With that SQL in hand, it should be pretty easy to tell why Magento isn't returning the objects you think it should.

Answer 2

There is more than one way to get the count of items in a collection. Unfortunately the PHP internal count function is probably not the most performant way.

Here are two others to try:

echo $collection->count();

echo $collection->getSize();

What I suspect is happening is either your collection isn't as deep as you think it is; there is a memory issue with the PHP count function (iterates the collection as an array); or count isn't aware of how many items there actually are due to lazy loading, where the collection isn't actually being loaded up at the time you're asking for its count.