CakePHP Model Relationships without resorting to Recursive

Question

I'm new to cakePHP and I'm having issues getting all of my models to link up correctly.

This is the layout of my models in cakePHP:

Class belongsTo Location
Class belongsTo ClassType
Class hasMany ScheduledClass
ScheduledClass belongsTo Instructor

My problem is that when I use:

$this->Class->find('all')

I only get data from the Class, Location, ClassType and ScheduledClass models. I do not get any data from the Instructor model.

I can set the recursive value to '2' and retreive the data from the Instructor model, but this results in a giant amount of queries(one for every row) instead of a join on "ScheduledClass.instructor_id = Instructor.id".

What I was hoping to acheive is something like:

SELECT
...
...
FROM classes as Class
INNER JOIN locations as Location on Class.location_id = Location.id
INNER JOIN class_types as ClassType on Class.class_type_id = ClassType.id
INNER JOIN scheduled_classes as ScheduledClass on ScheduledClass.class_id = Class.id
INNER JOIN instructors as Instructor on ScheduledClass.instructor_id = Instructor.id

I've tried using both Containable and Joins in order to get the right data, but I wasn't able to get either to work(possibly due to my misunderstanding their uses).

Thank you in advance!

Harsha M V Harsha M V · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-02T17:02:45

use Containable and set how you want the find to react and fetch what data you want.

in the Model

var $actsAs = array('Containable');

and in the Controller you can do something like this

$this->data = $this->User->find('first', array('conditions' => array('User.id' => $this->Auth->user('id')), 'contain' => array('City', 'Region', 'Country', 'UserOccupations', 'UserGroup')));

if you have your Model/Databases relationships set right you can pull the exact data you want even choosing which columns you wanna pull.

CakePHP Model Relationships without resorting to Recursive

1 Answers