CakePHP/Croogo: A veeery complex association - php

Question

When I was working on my current project, I ran into a rather complex issue. I'll point out my problem much more detailed right now:
There are three Models: User, UsersExtendedField and UsersExtended.
UsersExtendedField contains custom fields that can be managed manually. All custom fields can be shown in the Users view as well, and be filled out of course. The values are then stored in UsersExtended, which has got two foreignKeys: user_id and field_id.
The relations look like this: User hasMany UsersExtendedField, UsersExtendedField hasMany UsersExtended, UsersExtended belongsTo User, UsersExtendedField.
The problem: When accessing the Users view, a form with user information input is shown. Any UsersExtendedFields are available as well, and since these hasMany UsersExtended, they've got plenty of UsersExtended values. But I want to reduce those to only the value(s) that belong to the User, whose view is shown at the moment. Here are my (desired) relations:
Croogo::hookBehavior('User', 'Crooboard.ExtendedUser', array(
'relationship' => array(
'hasMany' => array(
'UsersExtendedField' => array(
'className' => 'Crooboard.UsersExtendedField',
'foreignKey' => '',
'conditions' => array('status' => 1)
),
),
),
));
class UsersExtendedField extends AppModel {
var $name = 'UsersExtendedField';
var $displayField = 'fieldname';
var $hasMany = array(
'UsersExtended' => array(
'className' => 'Crooboard.UsersExtended',
'foreignKey' => 'field_id',
'conditions' => array(
'UsersExtended.user_id = User.id'
)
),
);
}
This is not the full code, these are the important parts. The problem starts right where I wrote 'UsersExtended.user_id = User.id'. Obviously, this won't work. But I do not have any idea how to access the User.id here. I also could not imagine a HABTM structure to solve this task. Do you have any idea how to get the semantics of this 'UsersExtended.user_id = User.id' to work?
Thank your very much for taking the time to read through this and helping me!

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to set up your HABTM relationship properly.
You already have the join table, UsersExtended, which contains your foreign keys.
Remove all previous relationships and set up HABTM in each of your User and UserExtendedField models.
The relationship code in your User model would look like this:
var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(
'UsersExtended' => array(
'className' => 'UsersExtended',
'joinTable' => 'UsersExtended', //assuming this is the
//name of that model's table
'foreignKey' => 'user_id',
'associationForeignKey' => 'field_id'
)
);
For more information check out the page in the cakephp book
In addition, this blog post helped me grasp the relationship concepts when I was learning cakephp.