Add Category tree, if not exists programmatically

Question

Ive been through several answers before succumbing to ask a question. I will list what i tried and why i think this is a bit of a special case, and not a duplicate.

Am reading a .csv file from my customer. Each product has 3 fields for the category (among other fields, sku, name, weight etc).

[ParentCategoryType] => CLOTHING
[ParentCategory] => SHIRTS
[Category] => SHIRTS CASUAL
[Gender] => MEN

What I want is to create the category if it does not exist, in the tree. I.e. The current item's tree is

Men/Clothing/Shirts/Shirts Casual

but there is also a similar category starting with Women/Clothing/Shirts/Shirts Casual

I would like to check if given the current tree, there is such a category and if not add it. I realize maybe this will need to be recursive, so it can add the categories in between. For example maybe Men/Clothing/Shirts doesn't exist, and needs to add Shirts, and then Shirts Casual

I tried:

• This answer here , which causes error 500
• This answer here, which kinda works (it adds a category so if i recurse my list maybe ill manage) BUT this seems messy and maybe does stuff it doesn't need.
• and many other similar, others being very vague and others outdated.

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tl;dr

Given the string Men/Clothing/Shirts/Shirts Casual

I want to create the tree accordingly, so when given Men/Clothing/Pants, only pants should be created, and when given Women/Clothing/Shirts/Shirts Casual, another tree with root Women is created

Answer 1

What I ended up using.. don't know if its the best way, but am doing a recursion in the "path" i give as a parameter

The function:

$path = 'Men/Clothing/Shirts/Shirts Casual';
$parentId=2;
recursivelyCreateCategories($path, $parentId);


protected function recursivelyCreateCategories($str, $parentId) {
        $ar = explode("/", $str);
        if(empty($ar) || $str == '') {
            return;
        }
        //check if name = $ar[0] with $parId exists
        $name = $ar[0];
        if($name == '') {
            return;
        }
        $category = $this->_objectManager
            ->create('Magento\Catalog\Model\Category');
        $cate = $category->getCollection()
            ->addAttributeToFilter('name', $name)
            ->addAttributeToFilter('parent_id', $parentId)
            ->getFirstItem();

        $cate_exists = $cate->getId();

        //$exists_id = checkCategoryExists(); //returns id if exists, false if not
        if(isset($cate_exists)) {
            unset($ar[0]);
            $ar = implode("/", $ar);

            echo 'Parent exists with id: ' . $cate_exists . "\n";
            if($ar) {
                $this->recursivelyCreateCategories($ar, $cate_exists);
            } else {
                return;
            }
        } else {
            //create
            //run function
            //$create_id is newly created category id
            $category = array('category_name' => $name, 'category_parentId' => $parentId);
            $cat_to_pass = $this->prepareData($category);
            $create_id = $this->createCategory($cat_to_pass);
            if($create_id) {
                //category created
                echo 'Category ' . $category['category_name'] . ' created' . "\n";
            } else {
                //failed to create category
                echo 'Failed to create category: ' . $category['category_name'] . "\n";
            }

            unset($ar[0]);
            $ar = implode("/", $ar); //Sub1/Sub2/Sub3';
            if($ar) {
                $this->recursivelyCreateCategories($ar, $create_id);
            } else {
                return;
            }
        }
    }