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CakePHP, Chris' Brain, PHP

A Glimpse Inside CakePHP 1.2:

09.04.07 | 6 Comments

One of my co-workers over at CDC (the mighty gwoo) gave a talk to the Orange Country PHP group about CakePHP 1.2 and some of the features that it contains. One of the more interesting items, well interesting to *me* anyway, is the addition of a convenience feature to "has and belongs to many" associations called "with". Stolen directly from gwoo's slides, here's an example of it:

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. <?php
  2. class Post extends AppModel {
  3. var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(
  4.  ‘Tag’ => array(
  5.  ‘className’ => ’Tag’,
  6.  ‘with’ => ‘TaggedPost’,
  7.  )
  8.  );
  9.  
  10.     function beforeSave() {
  11.          if(!empty($this->data[‘Tag’])) {
  12. $this->TaggedPost->save($this->data[‘Tag’]);
  13.          }
  14.     }
  15. }
  16. ?>

So what is the "with" parameter really for? It's nothing more than a convenience parameter that lets you apply a label to the name of your join table, so you don't have to call it by it's ugly name, in this case PostTags. Want to see it in action?

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. <?php
  2. class PostsController extends AppController {
  3. var $name = ‘Posts’;
  4. function tags() {
  5. $this->set(‘tags’, $this->Post->TaggedPost->findAll());
  6. }
  7. }
  8. ?>
  9.  
  10. <?php
  11. foreach ($tags as $tag) :
  12. echo $tag[‘Post’][‘title’];
  13. echo $tag[‘Tag’][‘name’];
  14. echo $tag[‘TaggedPost’][‘date’];
  15. endforeach;
  16. ?>

It's little touches like that, unseen by a lot of developers, that makes CakPHP just a little bit easier to use with each passing day. You can download gwoo's slides here.

6 Comments


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