Question

I have 2 models, User and Entity. I need to on my entities page, have pagination, and a simple search function. The search function will filter the entities, but the data it filters is a virtualField within the User model.

The Entity model:

public $belongsTo = array(
    'User' => array(
        'className' => 'User',
        'foreignKey' => 'user_id',
        'conditions' => '',
        'fields' => '',
        'order' => ''
    )
 };

The virtual field in the User model:

 public $virtualFields = array("searchFor" => "CONCAT(User.first_name, ' ',User.last_name, ' ',User.email)");

And the condition within the entity controller:

 $conditions["User.searchFor LIKE"] = "%".str_replace(" ","%",$this->passedArgs["searchFor"])."%";
 $this->paginate = array(
                'conditions' => $conditions,
                'order' => array('Re.created' => 'DESC'),
                'limit' => 20
            );

From what I can read this is not possible because I cannot use virtualFields within a query of an associative model, and it says I must use it in “run time”, but I really do not understand how to do that, or how to do that in this instance. Any ideas or a way I can get this to work?

Answer 1

For this purpose I needed to do a search on a concatinated string from an associated model. Normally this can be done using Virtualfields in cake, but cake does not support using a virtualField from an associated model in the search.

Seeing that the 2 models were already linked with the belongsTo, I merely changed the condition to:

 "conditions" => "CONCAT(User.first_name, ' ',User.last_name, ' ',User.email) LIKE" => "%".str_replace(" ","%",$this->passedArgs["searchFor"])."%"

Probably not the most elegant solution, but it works.