Question

I have a question that’s been bugging me all afternoon:

I’m making a guitar gear site, so I am using a gear items table, a user table, and gear-to-user bridge table. That is, a user can own multiple items and items can belong to multiple users. So HABTM.

An item belongs to a brand (e.g. Fender – Stratocaster), so I set up a belongsTo relationship in the item model as well as a HasMany relationship in the brands model. When I check the output in the items controller, the gear and its associated brand’s data is all there as it should be.

The user control panel (and similar areas) basically list all of the user’s owned items. After setting up the HABTM relationship between users and items, I checked the controller’s output. While the item’s information and the bridge table information all appeared, the item’s associated brand information did not. The results should essentially be a list of items, including brand information, as if it were “where user_id = x”. Instead, it seems to only be grabbing the item information and none of its relationships.

Is there something I’m missing or a dumb mistake? Thanks.

Answer 1

Did you consider setting/changing the recursive attribute when performing find() on the User?
The higher recursive is set, the deeper associations will be found.

An alternative might be to use the Containable behavior on User:

$this->User->find('first',array(
    'conditions'=>array('User.id'=>1),  
    'contain' => array('Item'=>array('Brand'))
));