how do I get product data when adding to cart and listening for the “checkout_cart_product_add_after” event

Question

I am a developer stuck on an interesting problem, I am trying to retrieve the stock data for a simple product as it is added to the cart. The simple product is added from the product page of a configurable product. When I look at the properties of $observer->getEvent()->getProduct(), it appears as though the product data is that of the configurable product and not the simple product, which makes no sense to me. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This is just what runs through my mind but there might be more elegant ways:

$productId = $configurableProduct->getOptionByCode('simple_product')->getProductId();
$simple = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($productId);