Filter category products based on certain IDs

When building a special feature in Magento 2, one of the general requirements is to be displayed only certain products In the Category List page – although the category may contain more.

For example, maybe you just want to highlight a series of product IDs chosen by hand for campaigns or limiting visibility based on business rules.

Magento provides a flexible search and list mechanism Elasticsearch (in 2.4+).

To achieve this, we can intercept the request for search and inject our own Product id filter into the request of elasticsearch.

On this blog, I will guide you through how to do it step by step.

Step 1: Understand the flow

List of Magento Category Products Using Catalog search layer Internally, even when exploring the category. Kueri passed:

• \Magento\CatalogSearch\Model\Search\RequestGenerator (Building search requests)
• \Magento\Framework\Search\AdapterInterface::query() (Running the query in elasticsearch)

If we want to control which products appear, the cleanest way is to make A plugin at query() method from AdapterInterface. There we can inject us The product id that is permitted into request.

Step 2: Create a Special Module Framework

Let’s make a simple module, for example:
Vendor/CustomFilter

app/code/Vendor/CustomFilter/
├── etc
│   └── di.xml
├── Plugin
│   └── SearchAdapterPlugin.php
├── registration.php
└── etc/module.xml

Step 3: Determine the plugin in di.xml

In the etc/di.xmlState the plugin on AdapterInterface:

<?php
namespace Vendor\CustomFilter\Plugin;

use Magento\Framework\Search\RequestInterface;
use Magento\Elasticsearch\SearchAdapter\Aggregation\Builder as AggregationBuilder;
use Magento\Elasticsearch\SearchAdapter\ConnectionManager;
use Magento\Elasticsearch\SearchAdapter\ResponseFactory;
use Magento\Elasticsearch\ElasticAdapter\SearchAdapter\Mapper;
use Magento\Elasticsearch\SearchAdapter\QueryContainerFactory;

class SearchAdapterPlugin
{

     
    public function __construct(
        ConnectionManager $connectionManager,
        ResponseFactory $responseFactory,
        AggregationBuilder $aggregationBuilder,
        Mapper $mapper,
        QueryContainerFactory $queryContainerFactory,
        \Magento\Framework\App\RequestInterface $request,
        \Magento\Framework\App\ResourceConnection $resource
    ) {
        $this->connectionManager = $connectionManager;
        $this->responseFactory = $responseFactory;
        $this->aggregationBuilder = $aggregationBuilder;
        $this->mapper = $mapper;
        $this->queryContainerFactory = $queryContainerFactory;
        $this->request = $request;
        $this->connection = $resource->getConnection();
    }

    /**
     * Around plugin for Elasticsearch query
     */
    public function aroundQuery(
        \Magento\Framework\Search\AdapterInterface $subject,
        callable $proceed,
        RequestInterface $request
    ) {
        // Example: Allowed product IDs (could come from config, DB, or business logic)
        $allowedProductIds = [12, 34, 56, 78];

        $client = $this->connectionManager->getConnection();
        $aggregationBuilder = $this->aggregationBuilder;
        $updatedQuery = $this->mapper->buildQuery($request);

        if (!isset($updatedQuery['body']['query']['bool'])) {
            $updatedQuery['body']['query']['bool'] = [];
        }
        if (!isset($updatedQuery['body']['query']['bool']['filter'])) {
            $updatedQuery['body']['query']['bool']['filter'] = [];
        }

        $updatedQuery['body']['query']['bool']['filter'][] = ['ids' =>  ['values' => $allowedProductIds]];

        $aggregationBuilder->setQuery($this->queryContainerFactory->create(['query' => $updatedQuery]));
        
        $rawResponse = $client->query($updatedQuery);
        $rawDocuments = $rawResponse['hits']['hits'] ?? [];

        $queryResponse = $this->responseFactory->create(
                [
                    'documents' => $rawDocuments,
                    'aggregations' => $aggregationBuilder->build($request, $rawResponse),
                    'total' => $rawResponse['hits']['total']['value'] ?? 0
                ]
            );
        // Now proceed with modified query response
        return $queryResponse;
    }
}

This is what happened:

• We define an Around the plugin For query()
• Before continuing the request to Elasticsearch, we inject IDS filter
• Elasticsearch then returned Only the product ID In the results

Step 5: Delete Cache & Test

Run the usual setting command:

bin/magento setup:
bin/magento cache:flush

Now visit any category page – instead of all products, you will only see the id [12, 34, 56, 78].