Question

I am wondering how I would go about performing a certain function if a particular field in cakephp save has been updated.

function edit($id = null) {
    if (!empty($this->data)) {
        if ($this->Post->save($this->data)) {
                $this->Session->setFlash(__('The post has been saved', true));
            $this->redirect(array('action' => 'index'));
        } else {
            $this->Session->setFlash(__('The post could not be saved. Please, try again.', true));
        }
    }
}

So – what I would like to do is be able to determine exactly what has been changed in the edit data ($this->data) and if a certain field has been changed send an email notification. I know how to do the email part – but can’t figure out how I would do it if lets say a select box was changed from Enabled to Disabled. If changed from enabled to disabled email saying blah blah blah has been disabled.

Answer 1

You can read out the current saved content before you execute $this->Post->save() and compare the values after saving.

if (!empty($this->data)) {

  $oldValue=$this->Post->field('yourfield');

  if ($this->Post->save($this->data)) {
    if ($oldValue!=$this->data['Post']['yourfield'])
    {
      // do stuff
    }
    ...

As mark said, it would be cleaner to acomplish this direct in the model (e.g. in the case the data is changed in a different form)