Question

I have a site develop in cakephp 2.0.
I have a table “Product” related to property with hasMany, and HABTM to Product. A product can contain many product and that product can contain many product. I can have multiple level of product.
To make this relation I have used this model (explained into this question: cakephp HABTM same model):

class Product extends AppModel {
    public $name = 'Product';
    public $useTable = 'products';
    public $belongsTo = 'User';
    public $actsAs = array('Containable');

        public $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(
        'Ingredient' => array(
            'className' => 'Product',
            'joinTable' => 'ingredients_products',
            'foreignKey' => 'product_id',
            'associationForeignKey' => 'ingredient_id', 
            'unique' => true
        )
    );

} 

I know how to retrieve product example: I have a product that contain other product I make a find with condition and I retrieve all data with their property like this:

$this->set('product',$this->Product->find('all', array(
                    'contain' => array(
                            'Property',
                            'IngredientProduct'
                        ),
                    'conditions' => array('id' => $id)  
                )));

(IS ONLY AN EXAMPLE THE QUERY I DON?T KNOW IF IS GOOD DEPENDS OF MANY THINGS IS ONLY AN EXAMPLE)

But if I find 3/4 product inside my product and if findedproduct contain other product how can I do that? Because I don’t know how many “levels” I have I can have 1 level or 6 level of product. A product contain many products, this finded products contain other products ecc..
How can I do that and retrieve for each product its property? It’s a recursion query but the problem is that I don’t know how many level I have. Some ideas? Thanks

Answer 1

Containable does not traverse so deep. I would advice to unbind your associations and join tables manually. Take a look here to see an example and at this cookbook chapter (you need to know SQL in your case). Or you can use TreeBehavior as Dave suggested.