Question

I have an array that I am passing to my view and it’s joined with multiple tables. Let’s call this array Submissions. All submissions contain SubmissionVotes and a typical data submission object looks like this:

 [1] => Array
        (
            [Submission] => Array
                (
                    [user_id] => 17
                    [title] => Yo mama so fat when she went to the movies she sat next to everyone
                    [source] => http://www.ahajokes.com/ym01.html
                    [slug] => yo-mama-so-fat-when-she-went-to-the-movies-she-sat-next
                    [category] => funny
                    [created] => 2012-09-26 21:00:35
                    [id] => 104
                )

            [User] => Array
                (
                    [id] => 17
                    [username] => bob_cobb
                )

            [SubmissionsVote] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 323
                            [user_id] => 2
                            [submission_id] => 104
                            [vote_type] => up
                            [when] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00
                            [voted_ip] => 842844107
                        )

                    [1] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 322
                            [user_id] => 17
                            [submission_id] => 104
                            [vote_type] => up
                            [when] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00
                            [voted_ip] => 1163843117
                        )

                )

            [SubmissionThumbnails] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [id] => 6
                            [submission_id] => 104
                            [original] => http://www.ahajokes.com/g/smlogo.gif
                            [extension] => jpg
                            [slug] => http://www.ahajokes.com/g/smlogo.gif
                        )

                )

        )

Right now I’m just doing a foreach through this in my view and grabbing: $submission['Submission']['id'], $submission['Submission']['category'] and other useful stuff from it. This is all fine, but I’d like to somehow be able to just make a new object (or something equally as intuitive) that has the number of up vote_type and number of down vote_type so that I can just be like $submission['Submission']['upVotes'] / $submission['Submission']['downVotes'].

I’m doing the join in CakePHP and here is my query:

        $this->find('all', array(
                'fields' => array(
                    'Submission.user_id',
                    'Submission.title',
                    'Submission.source',
                    'Submission.slug',
                    'Submission.category',
                    'Submission.created',
                    'User.id',
                    'User.username'),
                'order' => 'Submission.created DESC'));

The only reason I want to do this is because going through and having to add up all upvotes and downvotes within my view would be quite the pain, not to mention pretty sloppy.

How can I improve this?

Answer 1

You could try using virtual fields: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/models/virtual-fields.html.

In your Submission model, you would have something similar to:

public $virtualFields = array(
    'up_count' => 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM submission_votes AS up_count WHERE submission_id = Submission.id AND vote_type = "up"',
    'down_count' => 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM submission_votes AS down_count WHERE submission_id = Submission.id AND vote_type="down"',
);

In the above example, submission_votes is your database table name for your SubmissionVote model. Be sure to heed the warning: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/models/virtual-fields.html#limitations-of-virtualfields.

If you just want to manipulate the data array, another option might be to use the something from the Hash class, such as Hash::reduce.

http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/hash.html#Hash::reduce