Question

All,

I wanted to know how I could pass a $variable from view, for example, current article id ( $article[‘Article’][‘id’] ) to the find(‘all’) call in a function in articles_controller.php.

function getRelated($id = null){
$relatedarticles = $this->Article->find(
                    'all',
                    array(
                         'fields' => array(
                        'Article.title'
                        ),
                         'limit' => 4,
                         'order' => 'Article.id ASC',
                         'recursive' => 1,
                         'conditions' => array(
                        'Article.category_id =' => $id
                         )
                         )
                    );

if (!empty($this->params['requested'])) {
    return $relatedarticles;
} else {
    $this->set(compact('relatedarticles'));
}
}

And then from the view, I would call something like this. I cant seem to get this to work… what is the best way to do this?

<div id="articles_view_related">
Related News
<?php 
    $currentid = $articles['Article']['id'];
    $relatedarticles = $this->requestAction('/articles/getRelated/id:$currentid');
    //debug($relatedarticles);
?>
<ul>
    <?php
        foreach($relatedarticles as $relatedarticle){
    ?>
    <li>
        <?php
            echo $relatedarticle['Article']['title'];
        ?>
    </li>
    <?php
        }
    ?>
</ul>

</div>

thank you for all your help

Answer 1

I’m struggling to work out why you are doing this task in this way, but here is your answer nonetheless:

$relatedarticles = $this->requestAction('/articles/getRelated/'.$currentid);

You don’t need id:$currendId, because of the parameter in your action, anything after /controller/action/ in a URL will be declared as $id in getRelated($id = null); eg: /articles/getRelated/23 and $id will equal 23.

---

What you should be doing, is declaring the getRelated() method in your model, and then using the controller action to get the contents, and pass it to the view.
eg:

$relatedArticles = $this->Article->getRelated($article['Article']['id']);
$this->set(compact('relatedArticles));

For data manipulation you want to repeat, stick it in your models 🙂