Question

I have a nodes table (Node model). I’d like it to be associated to different data types, but only if one if it’s field is set to 1.

Example:

My nodes table has a data_article field (tinyint 1). I only want the Node to $hasMany Article IF that field is a 1.

I tried this:

public $hasMany = array(
    'Article' => array(
        'conditions' => array('Node.data_articles' => '1')
    ),
);

But I get an error:

Column not found: 1054 Unknown column ‘Node.data_articles’ in ‘where
clause’

Because the association is doing the Article find in it’s own query:

SELECT `Article`.`id`, `Article`.`title`, `Article`.`node_id`, ...more fields...
FROM `mydatabase`.`articles` AS `Article`
WHERE `Node`.`data_artiles` = '1'
AND `Article`.`node_id` = ('501991c2-ae30-404a-ae03-2ca44314735d')

Obviously that doesn’t work, since the Node table isn’t being Joined at all in this query.

TLDR:

Is it possible to have associations or not based on a field in the main model? If not, how else can I keep different data types in multiple tables, and not have to query them all every time?

Answer 1

I don’t think that there’s a standard way to do this with CakePHP (at least I can’t imagine a way). What definitely is possible would be binding associated models dynamically.

So you might query your model without associations by passing the recursive parameter as -1 to the find() method and based on the result unbind the associated models dynamically. Afterwards you would have to query again, for sure. You might build a behavior out of this to make it reusable.

A quite elegant solution would be possible, if Cake could make a two-step query with a callback after the main model was queried, but before associated models are queried, but this isn’t possible at the moment.

Edit: There might be a non-Cake way to archieve this more performantly with a custom Query including IF-statements, but I’m not the SQL expert here.