Cakephp hasOne Model and hasAndBelongsToMany Model - php

Question

I am having problems with the CakePHP belongsTo and hasAndBelongsToMany relationships in CakePHP 2.x
Example situation
Table users
id
organisation_id
Table organisations
id
name
Table user_organisation_permissions
id
user_id
organisation_id
UserModel
hasAndBelongsToMany(Organisation);
belongsTo(Organisation)
A user belongs to one organisation but it has permissions on multiple organisations, resulting in the following conflict:
$aUser = $this->User->findById(1);
print_r($aUser);
// Output
# With the belongsTo relation
array(
'User' => array(
'id' => 1,
'organisation_id' => 1
'name' => 'Test User'
),
'Organisation' => array(
'id' => 1,
'name' => 'Test organisation'
)
);
# With the hasAndBelongsToMany relation
array(
'User' => array(
'id' => 1,
'organisation_id' => 1
'name' => 'Test User'
),
'Organisation' => array(
1 => array(
'id' => 1,
'name' => 'Test organisation'
),
2 => array(
'id' => 1,
'name' => 'Test organisation'
)
)
);
# When both relations are enabled it doesn't work
Does anybody have a solution for this conflict?
Is there a "native" CakePHP solution for this conflict?

Answer 1

The answer is actually in the CakePHP 2.x Cookbook.
Multiple relations to the same model
There are cases where a Model has more than one relation to another Model. For example, you might have a Message model that has two relations to the User model: one relation to the user who sends a message, and a second to the user who receives the message. The messages table will have a field user_id, but also a field recipient_id. Now your Message model can look something like:
class Message extends AppModel {
public $belongsTo = array(
'Sender' => array(
'className' => 'User',
'foreignKey' => 'user_id'
),
'Recipient' => array(
'className' => 'User',
'foreignKey' => 'recipient_id'
)
);
}
Source: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/models/associations-linking-models-together.html#multiple-relations-to-the-same-model