Difference between two commands of fetching Shopping Cart Items in Magento

Question

In Magento, if you need to get / fetch the Shopping Cart's Item details, you can do it in any of the two possible ways, which will provide you with all the shopped Items in an array:-

1. $cartItems1 = $cart->getQuote()->getAllItems();
2. $cartItems2 = $cart->getItems()->getData();

But before using any one of the above two methods, you need to initialize the shopping cart object as:-

$cart = new Mage_Checkout_Model_Cart();
$cart->init();

Can anyone please describe in details as to what the two options provide & their differences between each other, along with their possible usage.

In any more such option is available in Magento, can anyone please highlight it?

Answer 1

If you look at the code of the Cart and Quote classes everything will become clear.

Here's the code for $cart->getItems():

public function getItems()
{
  return $this->getQuote()->getAllVisibleItems();
}

Plain and simple - it just calls a method of the Quote object. So the question now is: What is the difference between getAllVisibleItems() and getAllItems() ?

Let's look at the code of both methods:

public function getAllItems()
{
    $items = array();
    foreach ($this->getItemsCollection() as $item) {
        if (!$item->isDeleted()) {
            $items[] =  $item;
        }
    }
    return $items;
}

public function getAllVisibleItems()
{
    $items = array();
    foreach ($this->getItemsCollection() as $item) {
        if (!$item->isDeleted() && !$item->getParentItemId()) {
            $items[] =  $item;
        }
    }
    return $items;
}

The only difference: getAllVisibleItems() has an additional check for each item:

!$item->getParentItemId()

which tests if the product has a parent (in other words, it tests if it is a simple product). So this method's return array will be missing simple products, as opposed to getAllItems() .

Are there any other ways to retrieve items?

One would be to directly get the product collection from the quote object:

$productCollection = $cart->getQuote()->getItemsCollection();