CakePHP - multiple hasAndBelongsToMany relationships not working - php

Question

New to CakePHP etc and I'm massively confused with following problem so any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Essentially I'm having problems with hasAndBelongsToMany relationships and I don’t know if I’m going about it correctly as I’m doing most of the work inside one controller and one model.
I have a client’s pages, clients have many jobs (this works), clients belong to a client type (this works), clients also have many case studies (also works) and clients have jobs (fine).
Jobs have and belong to many disciplines – this doesn’t work, however, it appears as though the queries are being run (the SQL output in debug mode shows this, so I ran the SQL directly into MySQL - it queries fine) but Cake is not providing me the data into the clients array.
Here is the code for my Client Model and Controller.
Client.php (Model)
public $belongsTo = array(
'ClientType' => array(
'className' => 'ClientType',
'foreignKey' => 'type_id',
'conditions' => '',
'fields' => '',
'order' => ''
)
);
public $hasMany = array(
'CaseStudy' => array(
'className' => 'CaseStudy',
'foreignKey' => 'main_contractor',
'conditions' => '',
'fields' => '',
'order' => ''
),
'Job' => array(
'className' => 'Job',
'foreignKey' => 'client_id',
'conditions' => '',
'fields' => '',
'order' => 'Job.id desc'
)
);
ClientsController.php (Controller)
$options['joins'] = array(
array('table' => 'case_studies',
'alias' => 'CaseStudy',
'type' => 'LEFT',
'conditions' => array(
'CaseStudy.client_id = Client.id',
)
),
array('table' => 'jobs',
'alias' => 'Job',
'type' => 'LEFT',
'conditions' => array(
'Job.client_id = Client.id',
)
),
array('table' => 'sectors',
'alias' => 'Sector',
'type' => 'LEFT',
'conditions' => array(
'Job.sector_id = Sector.id',
)
),
array('table' => 'disciplines_jobs',
'alias' => 'DisciplinesJobs',
'type' => 'LEFT',
'conditions' => array(
'Job.id = DisciplinesJobs.job_id',
)
),
array(
'table' => 'disciplines',
'alias' => 'Discipline',
'type' => 'LEFT',
'conditions' => array(
'DisciplinesJobs.discipline_id = Discipline.id'
)
)
);
$options['conditions'] = array('Client.id' => $client_id);
$clients = $this->Client->find('all', $options);
Output of $clients array above:
array(
(int) 0 => array(
'Client' => array(
'id' => '47',
'type_id' => '2',
'name' => 'Balfour Beatty',
'logo' => '1361786198_thumbnail_balfour beatty.jpg',
'website_url' => 'http://www.google.com',
'date_added' => '2013-02-25 10:56:38',
'date_modified' => '2013-02-25 10:56:38'
),
'ClientType' => array(
'id' => '2',
'name' => 'Constructors'
),
'CaseStudy' => array(
(int) 0 => array(
'id' => '23',
'client_id' => '47',
'sector_id' => '1',
'name' => 'Shoreham Academy',
'header_image' => '1365088787_thumbnail_1365088787_header copy.jpg',
'main_contractor' => '47',
'architect' => 'Architecture PLB',
'project_value' => '565000',
'scope_of_works' => '<table></table>',
'text' => '<p><</p>',
'type' => 'flooring',
'date_added' => '2013-04-04 11:19:47',
'date_modified' => '2013-04-04 11:19:47'
)
),
'Job' => array(
(int) 0 => array(
'id' => '1',
'client_id' => '47',
'sector_id' => '2',
'project' => 'Shoreham Academy (Project not case study)',
'date' => '2012-10-19',
'cost' => '£416k',
'quantity_of_flooring' => '7000m',
'date_added' => '2013-08-06 21:46:59',
'date_modified' => '2013-08-06 21:47:01'
)
)
)
Notice the above $clients array doesn’t have any disciplines data from the discipline_jobs table but the SQL output is which runs successfully:
SELECT `Client`.`id`, `Client`.`type_id`, `Client`.`name`, `Client`.`logo`, `Client`.`website_url`, `Client`.`date_added`, `Client`.`date_modified`, `ClientType`.`id`, `ClientType`.`name`
FROM `ar_flooring`.`clients` AS `Client`
LEFT JOIN `ar_flooring`.`case_studies` AS `CaseStudy` ON (`CaseStudy`.`client_id` = `Client`.`id`)
LEFT JOIN `ar_flooring`.`jobs` AS `Job` ON (`Job`.`client_id` = `Client`.`id`)
LEFT JOIN `ar_flooring`.`sectors` AS `Sector` ON (`Job`.`sector_id` = `Sector`.`id`)
LEFT JOIN `ar_flooring`.`disciplines_jobs` AS `DisciplinesJobs` ON (`Job`.`id` = `DisciplinesJobs`.`job_id`) LEFT JOIN `ar_flooring`.`disciplines` AS `Discipline` ON (`DisciplinesJobs`.`discipline_id` = `Discipline`.`id`)
LEFT JOIN `ar_flooring`.`client_types` AS `ClientType` ON (`Client`.`type_id` = `ClientType`.`id`)
WHERE `Client`.`id` = 47
I don’t have a discipline model or controller. I don’t have a jobs model or controller because I’m trying to do everything with the clients model and controller – is this correct?
Does anyone know why this is happening?
Hope this makes sense.
Cheers!

Answer 1

It appears that you want to run a
$this->Client->find('all')
at your ClientsController.
In that find all, you want to retrieve a list of Clients, the ClientType each Client belongsTo, the CaseStudy list each Client has, the Job list each Client has, and the Discipline each Job hasAndBelongsTo.
First, as a practitioner of CakePHP, I almost always avoid using the habtm relationship.
The reason is that it is almost always the case that I have extra fields in the join table. In this case, jobs_disciplines is likely to have more than just job_id and discipline_id. Maybe it will also have another field called status.
What I would do is that I will bake the JobsDiscipline model and the Discipline Model.
JobsDiscipline will belong to both Discipline and Job.
Both Discipline and Job will have many JobsDiscipline.
After this, the query to construct is basically just
$this->Client->find('all', array(
'contain' => array('ClientType', 'CaseStudy', 'Job' => array('JobsDiscipline'=>array('Discipline')))
));
This should work even if you set the recursive at your AppModel to be -1.
If this does not work, let me know again.