Magento: First and Last item collection

Magento developers work mostly with data collections. For accessing the data we use ‘foreach’ to iterate over collection.

$product_collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
        ->getCollection()
        ->addAttributeToSelect('*');
 
foreach ($product_collection as $k => $v)
{
    echo $v->getName();
    echo '<br/>';       
}

If we need only the first or last item from the collection, Magento gives an alternate way to do this.

var_dump($product_collection->getFirstItem()->getData());
echo $product_collection->getFirstItem()->getName();
 
echo $product_collection->getLastItem()->getName();
var_dump($product_collection->getLastItem()->getData()); 

If you your Collection data as XML, There’s a method for that also

var_dump($product_collection->getFirstItem()->toXml() );