How to assign categories for products in magento Programmatically

categories, magento, mass-assignment, product

Solution

Here is how you can assign multiple products to a category and merge with the existing products. The example is for one category but you can turn it into a loop to make it work for more.

$categoryId = 6; 
$category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->setStoreId(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID)->load($categoryId);
//get the current products
$products = $category->getProductsPosition();
//now attach the other products.
$newProductIds = array(1,2,3,4,5);
foreach ($newProductIds as $id){
    $products[$id] = 1;//you can put any other position number instead of 1.
}
//attach all the products to the category
$category->setPostedProducts($products);
//save the category.
$category->save();

If you want an even faster way of doing it you can do direct inserts in the table `catalog_category_product`. Just make sure you reindex when you are done.

Problem

I am a newbie in magento. Basically, I want to assign multiple products to multiple categories. I have followed this post and I have done the following code which is working fine: ``` $collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();//my coustom collection $categorys_ids = array(1,2,3,4,5);//Array of ids etc if ($categorys_ids != NULL && $collection->getData()!= NULL) { foreach ($collection as $product) { $categories_pd = $product->getCategoryIds(); $product->setCategoryIds(array_merge($product->getCategoryIds(),array($categorys_ids))); $product->save(); } } ``` Now, the main issue is that when I assign set category id for the products it takes a lot of time. I have 200 products and this takes up to two minutes or so, which is a lot of time. I was wondering if there is a way that I can assign categories to a products array instead of assigning products to categories or something that can be optimized and take less time.

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