How to get a list of product categories and their ID's from Magento?

Question

I'm trying to import a large number of products from a DB into Magento. The DB has many different product categories, which I've recreated within Magento. However, when importing the products via a CSV, you must list the category ID rather than the name. Is there any way to bring up a list like the following:

id | category
1 | pies
2 | guns
3 | cars

The only way that I can see at the moment is to manually create a product 'Pie', 'Gun' etc and then export to CSV, but this will take a depressingly long time. Just as an aside - does anyone really truly understand all of Magento - it seems insanely complex?

Thanks

Answer 1

There's probably a easy way to do this using PHP / Magento code, but if you want to look directly at the database:

Try something like this:

SELECT entity_id AS categoryID, value AS categoryName
FROM catalog_category_entity_varchar
WHERE attribute_id=111

But attribute_id might be something other than 111 for you. Take a look at the table to see.

Answer 2

Yes magento is a beast, but it can be tamed ;)

Wouldn't recommend looking directly at the db unless your brave enough.

To get the categories, do this in any of the frontend templates

$helper = Mage::helper('catalog/category');
$cats   = $helper->getStoreCategories();
var_dump($cats);