Question

I have two tables:

Contestant and Votes
Contestant hasMany Votes

I’ve tried doing a count(Vote.id) as Votes so I can place it on the
recordset and just paginate them but I have no idea where to place it.
I did it on the fields array but it gave me the total count of votes
regardless of the contestant they belong to.

The votes are linked together in the Contestant recordset so what I
did was on my view I did a count($contestant[Vote]) but this can’t be
paginated and my client wants to be able to sort the contestants by
votes.

Is there a way I can do something like this on my view?:

sort(‘Votes’, ‘count(Vote)’); ?>

Or do I have to create a query which does a count for all the votes
where Contestant.id = Votes.contestant_id ?

Controller Contestant:

function index() {
            $page = 'Contestants';
            $this->set('page', $page);
            $this->paginate =
            array(
                    'order' => 'id ASC',
                    'contain' => array(
                            'Vote' => array(
                                    'fields' => array("Vote.contestant_id",'Vote.id')
                            )
                    )
            $conditions ["Contestant.active"] = 1;
            $this->set('contestants', $this->paginate('Contestant',

$conditions));
}

Answer 1

Since cakephp doesn’t support group by in containable behavior I tried a different approach. Create the paginate var for the vote model instead (All of this is done in the Contestants Controller):

var $paginate = array(
    'Vote'=>array(
        'limit'=>5,
        'fields' => array(
        'Contestant.*, count(Vote.contestant_id) as Contestant_votes, Vote.id'
        ),
        'group' => array(
        'Vote.contestant_id'
        ),
        'order' => array(
        'Contestant_votes Desc'
        )
    ),
    'Contestant'=>array(
        'limit'=>5,
        'order' => array(
        'Contestant.id Desc'
        )
    )
);

And now in my controller I do the following:

function index() {
    $page = 'Contestants';
    $this->set('page', $page);  
    $conditions ["Contestant.active"] = 1;
    $this->set('contestants', $this->paginate($this->Contestant->Vote,$conditions));
}

Now the contestants are ordered by their total vote tally, although I still can’t figure how to place the Contestant_votes as a paginator variable since in the record set it’s in a array of it’s own and not in any of the model arrays used to paginate.

Thanks Matt Huggins your approach was the one that led me to this solution.