Question

I have two tables: Users and Profiles. A user may have a profile and a profile must have a user!

The tables are:

Users:
id
username
email
password

Profiles:
firstname
lastname
gender
dob
user_id

So as you can see the profiles table links back to the users via the user_id key

How do I view a profile based on the username of that user?

As it needs to pull information from both tables… so far I have:

public function view ( $username )
{
    $profile = $this->Profile->find('first', array(
                'conditions' => array('User.username' => $username)
            ));

    if (empty($profile))
    {
        $this->cakeError('error404');
    }

    $this->set(compact('profile'));
}

and this is the route for it:

Router::connect('/people/:userName',array('controller'=>'profiles','action'=>'view'),
    array(
        'userName'=>'[A-Za-z0-9\._-]+',
        'pass'=>array('userName')
    )
);

Also here are the Models:

User:

class User extends AppModel
{
    var $name = 'User';
}

I have not specified the user hasOne profile, as the user may not have a profile. e.g admin account

Profile:

class Profile extends AppModel
{
    var $name = 'Profile';

    var $belongsTo = 'User';
}

and here is my view:

<h1><?php echo $profile['Profile']['firstname']; ?> <?php echo $profile['Profile']['lastname']; ?></h1>

But need some steer to get it correct. According to the CakePHP 2.0 book I can do something like: $this->User-Profile-> but I don’t fully understand it or how I could use it here???

For example would this be correct:

$profile = $this->Profile->User->find('first', array(
'conditions' => array('User.username' => $username)
));

Thanks

Answer 1

According to your routes, you are going to use a ‘User’ model from ProfilesController. For this to work, you should add after the class ProfilesController extends Controller the following line :

public $uses = array('User','Profile');

Then you get directly the User model like this :

$this->User->...

I may be wrong, but I don’t think you could possibly do $this->Profile->User

[EDIT :]

after discussing this, it appears the User Model should really have $hasOne='Profile';

Because it does not enforce a profile, but just get it from database if it ever exists.