Magento's flat catalog visibility column

Question

I am almost finishing an exporting system of my flat catalog but I am with a little doubt about this column visibility. I don't know exactly what should I put in there to get only visible and active products. What can I do to approach this? Here is the query that I am using right now:

SELECT * FROM catalog_product_flat_1 WHERE visibility=4

Answer 1

The column visbility isn't about the activity status of a product, only where it should be displayed when it's active. The visibility column may contain one of the following values:

• 1: Not Visible Individually
• 2: Catalog
• 3: Search
• 4: Catalog and Search

So it depends if you also want to get the products that are only visible in the catalog and not the search, if these do actually exists. But most likely you indeed to use 4 in your where clause regarding the visibility.