CakePHP - saveAssociated/saveAll behaves like saveMany - php

Question

I have two Models, namely Product and ProductSpecification which have the following relations in place:
(Product Model)
public $hasMany = array(
'ProductSpecification' => array(
'className' => 'ProductSpecification',
'foreignKey' => 'product_id',
'dependent' => true
)
);
and
(ProductSpecification Model)
public $belongsTo = array(
'Product' => array(
'className' => 'Product',
'foreignKey' => 'product_id'
)
);
Using the CakePHP Form helper I post ProductSpecification data and then I use the saveAll method (or saveAssociated, I've tried both) to save the data. debug($this->request->data) gives me the following output after POSTing:
array(
'Product' => array(
'id' => '2'
),
'ProductSpecification' => array(
'title' => 'test',
'step' => '1',
'position' => '1'
)
)
This is great, right..? Now, the line after the debug I use the following code to save (I've also tried saveAssociated):
if($this->Product->saveAll($this->request->data))
For some odd reason this saves three(!) empty rows in my ProductSpecification table, with only the product_id field (and id) set; the fields title, step and position are empty. Exactly the same behavior happens when I run saveAssociated. What am I doing wrong?
I'm running CakePHP 2.x.

Answer 1

Your save data should look more like this:-
array(
'Product' => array(
'id' => '2'
),
'ProductSpecification' => array(
array(
'title' => 'test',
'step' => '1',
'position' => '1'
)
)
);
The values for ProductSpecification need to be passed as a numerically indexed array for the hasMany relationship.
Also, make sure you use saveAssociated() rather than saveAll() as you are passing associated data so there is no need to use the wrapper method (which should be avoided wherever possible).