How to set related products By code for each product in magento

Question

I have a magento store in which we already created more than 300 products. The thing is each 10 to 15 products are more than 80% same name format.

Eg:

Embroidered Vine - 12
Embroidered Vine - 13
Embroidered Vine - 14
Embroidered Vine - 15
Embroidered Vine - 16
Embroidered Vine - 17

Here right now am showing the other related items by entering those items in description field. Instead i want to run a script and the script will needs to add the related products automatically because product names are similar except the last two characters. Please can some one tell me how i can setup related products in magento by code automatically.

Is there any function like setRelatedItems() to the product in magento.

Am using magento 1.4.2

Answer 1

You could just do some raw SQL queries for this. I have worked on a dataload that mass imports products into magento so I know how to do it.

What you could do is the following:

SELECT DISTINCT cpev.entity_id

FROM catalog_product_entity_varchar cpev

WHERE value LIKE 'Embroidered Vine%'

Here you now have all the entity id's of the products that start with 'Embroidered Vine' as title. This result can be stored in an array let's say $result.

Then you have to make a double loop (for each Embroidered Vine product you must add all the other Embroidered Vine products as related product)

First make a copy of all the 'Embroidered Vine' products in another array for the foreach loop (this may not be needed but still just do it).

$copy = $result; // Where result is the result of the query (= the entity_id's)
foreach($result as $main_product){ //Each 'Embroidered Vine' product
  foreach($copy as $related_product){
    if($main_product["entity_id"] == $related_product["entity_id"])
      continue; //We do not want to add the same products as related product

    // Insert related product
    mysql_query("INSERT INTO catalog_product_link (product_id,linked_product_id,link_type_id) VALUES ($main_product["entity_id"],$related_product["entity_id"],1)");
  }
}

If you need more help just add a comment and I will see what I can do ;)

I hope this has helped you.

Regards, Kenny