Question

I am designing a database with the code igniter datamapper.
Imagine that I have a three tables one with users and one with friends and one with foods friend like. I am trying to access the food friend like. I have populated all the tables with data mapper.
Here is how I do it:

user table has id, user_name, gender, user_id fields.

Every user has many friends and friend table is:

friend table has id, friend_id, friend_name, user_id

Every friend has many foods and here is table for it:
friend id food

I was able to populate the tables by filing out the values. Lets say for example:

user:
1 andy male 394 
2 jen  female 439
..

friend:
1 243 mark 394
2 493 silvia 394
3 459 gloria 439
...

So when I try to access friend of a user from the database I do this:

$u->get_by_user_id($data['user']['id']);

if ($u->exists())
{ 
$data['user']['first_name'] = $u->first_name;
$data['user']['last_name'] = $u->last_name;
$data['user']['gender'] = $u->gender;
$data['user_friends']=$u->friend->get();

and it works…(i don’t know why it knows what is the id of friend to relate to) but it works…
now I am trying to go one level deeper and access or get() every users’ friends foods…but I do’t know how?

Answer 1

Ok I found the answer:

 if ($u->exists())
{ 
$data['user_profile']['first_name'] = $u->first_name;
    $data['user_profile']['last_name'] = $u->last_name;
$data['user_friends']=$u->friend->get();

foreach($u->friend->get()->all as $u){

$fm=new Food();
$fm->get_by_friend_id($u->friend_id)->get();

foreach($fm->all as $fm){
//stuff
          }
}