How to join database tables using cakePHP? - php

Question

Now I have been trying to tackle this issue for a few hours now, and I been trying google and the documentation and read it over and over, but I can't seem to understand it.
Let me try explain what im doing, but simplify the project, assume I am making a blog with cakePHP. I got this 3 tables to make it simple we use only the needed fields.
Table: posts
Desc: This table store all our posts
Fields:
postid - Identifier for the post
title - The posts title
Table: sections
Desc: this table contains categories
Fields:
sectionid - Identifier
sectionname - Name
Table: postlinks
Desc: this table store relations between posts and categories.
Fields:
postid – Post ID to determine what post is linked to what section
sectionid – Section ID to determine the section this post belong to
Let me now try explain what I want to achieve with cakePHP by showing an example with regular php and SQL codes:
(Note this code was written up on the go and might not work but it should give you an idea on what I'm trying to do)
<?php
/**
*Block of code to fetch all posts
*/
while ( $rows = mysql_fetch_array($query) )
{
$postid = $rows['postid'];
/** Join postlinks and sections **/
$sql = “SELECT sections.*, postlinks.* FROM postlinks
INNER JOIN sections
ON postlinks.sectionid = sections.sectionid
WHERE postlinks.postid = '$postid'”;
$query = mysql_query($sql);
print “-- TITLE --”;
print “-- CONTENT --”;
print “Posted in “;
/** Loop all categories **/
while ( $rows = mysql_fetch_array($query) )
{
print $rows['sectionname'] . “ “;
}
}
?>
And now I will try explain with words what I am trying to achieve:
When a visitor is browsing the web page, and enter the blog part of the site, I wish to list X latest posts, and this posts can be put in more than one category, and we will store all category links in a separate table, and here is where I am stuffed, I can manage to get the links out but I can't seem to join the tables and loop out the name.
Hope someone can shed some light on this problem I got with either point me in the right direction and/or show me an example code.
As mentioned I have been reading the documentation, and I have attempted searching for the answer but

Answer 1

association is implement as a join in cakephp.
please follow the concept for HABTM i.e "Has And Belongs To Many"
make a declaration in you model association.
declare the association in your cakephp query.
recursive -> -1 or 0 or 1 or 2
to Know more about association please visit this link enter link description here