Question

I apologize for the confusing title, I was a little stumped as to how to word my question.

I am new to CakePHP, but am following along through the cookbook/tutorials nicely, however I have come up against something which I cannot find an answer to.

My structure is as follows:

'Invoices' hasMany 'InvoiceHistory'
'InvoiceHistory' belongsTo 'InvoiceHistoryDeliveryStatus'

Whereby, an invoice can have multiple invoice histories, and each history contains a delivery status id, which links to a name.

On the Invoice view (index.ctp) I am displaying a list of all invoices but wish to display the Most Recent Delivery Status Name (InvoiceHistory contains a date field so it can be sorted) – thereby displaying the ‘current Delivery Status’.
When I do:

$this->set('invoices', $this->Invoice->find('all'));

It does not go deep enough in what it returns to provide me with Delivery Status Names, nor have I deduced a way of only returning the most recent Invoice History within my result. I know how to do this manually with a MYSQL query but I figured that is probably just plain wrong.

What is the correct way of going about this while following CakePHP conventions?

Answer 1

Use Containable

$this->Invoice->Behaviors->attach('Containable');

$this->set('invoices', $this->Invoice->find('all', array(
    'contain' => array(
        'InvoiceHistory' => array(
            'InvoiceHistoryDeliveryStatus'
        )
    )
));