Question

I have been trying to figure out how to do this and it seems that its not something that many people are trying to do in cakephp or I am just completely misunderstanding the documentation.. I am using the following query below to get a field value so I get a value where the “findbycreated” is 0… this part works fine

$unregisteredemail = $this->Testmodel->findBycreated('0');
$emailaddress = $unregisteredemail['Testmodel']['emailaddress'] ;
$emailpassword = $unregisteredemail['Testmodel']['password'] ;

But now, after I do some things with this data that I retrieved, I want to mark a field, in the same row, in the same model / table as a value of ‘1’ to indicate that an action has taken place (email address has been successfully created, for example)… I just can’t figure out how to do this in cakephp despite my efforts of going through the documentation and searching, this should be rather simple, I am tempted, at this point, to just use a regular mysql query as its a simple query.. basically the query is (please excuse my syntax as I haven’t used direct mysql queries in a while) “update (database / table) set ‘created’=’1′ where ’emailaddress’=$emailaddress”

Or I could use the row ID, if needed, as cakephp seems to prefer this, but still can’t get how to do this.. this is my attempt below that is not working:

// update database to show that email address has been created
$this->Testmodel->read('emailaddress', $this->Testmodel->findBycreated('0'))
$this->Testmodel->id = 1;
$this->Testmodel->set(array(
            'created' => '1'
            ));

 $this->Testmodel->save();

Answer 1

There are, as you can see from the previous answers, several ways to achieve the same end. I’d just like to explain a little about why your way didn’t work.

In the model, CakePHP has abstracted the database row(s) into an array according its implementation of ORM . This provides us with a handy way of manipulating the data and chucking it around the MVC architecture.

When you say:

$this->Testmodel->set(array(
            'created' => '1'
            ));

You are dealing directly with the model, but the data is actually stored, as an array, in a class variable called $data. To access and manipulate this data, you should instead say:

$this->data['Testmodel']['created'] => '1';

The reason for specifying the model name as the first index is that where associated tables have been retrieved, these can be accessed in the same way, so you might have , for instance:

Array([Testmodel] => Array ([id] => 1,
                            [created] => [1],
                            ...
                           )
      [Relatedmodel] => Array ([id] => 1,
                               [data] => asd,
                            ...
                           )
     )

…and so on. Very handy.

Now, when you use $this->MyModelName->save() with no parameters, it uses $this->data by default and uses the part of the array of data appropriate to the model you are calling the save method on. You can also pass an array of data, formatted in the same way if, for some reason, you don’t (or can’t) use $this->data.

Your use of the method read() is incorrect. The first parameter should be null, a string or an array of strings (representing fieldname(s)). The second parameter should be the id of the record you wish to read. Instead, for param 2, you are passing the result of a find, which will be an array. The result, which you are not capturing, will be empty.

I would write your code like:

$this->data = $this->Testmodel->read('emailaddress',1); 
$this->data['Testmodel']['created'] = 1;
$this->Testmodel->save();

or more succinctly:

$this->Testmodel->id = 1;
$this->Testmodel->saveField('created', 1);