Question

I have looked through containable component and other questions here, but doesn’t look like that can help me.

Basically, I have paginate set to 1, which returns me something just like

Array
(
[0] => Array
(
    [ModelName1] => Array
    (
        [id] => 83
        [parent_id] => null
        [field1] => value1
    )

    [AssociatedModelName1] => Array
    (
        [id] => 1
        [field1] => value1
    )

    [children] => Array
    (
        [0] => Array
        (
            [ModelName] => Array
            (
                [id] => 42
                [parent_id] => 83
                [field1] => value1
                [field2] => value2
                [field3] => value3
            )

            [AssociatedModelName] => Array
            (
                [id] => 2
                [field1] => value1
                [field2] => value2
                [field3] => value3
            )

I am able to limit the output of ModelName1 and AssociatedModelName1 ‘s field by adding

$fields => array("ModelName1.field1") 

to the setting array. In fact I pass this to the “column” of the DataTable Plugin’s component initialization, but it should be the same.

However, since there are SO MANY CHILDREN, and each children contains a lot of fields, I would like to get only the “field2” of each children.

How can I achieve that? If I specify “Children.ModelName1”, I get a SQL1054 error, which is column not found.

Any clue?

Answer 1

You must use a conditional array in one way or another:

$this->paginate['Model'] = array(
    'contain' => array(
        'ChildModel' => array(
            'fields' => array('ChildModel.field1', 'Childmodel.field2'),
            'ChildChildModel' => array(
                'fields' => array('ChildChildModel.field1', 'ChildChildModel.field2'),
            )
        )
    )
);