Question

I’ m just getting into Yii and am finding it a little confusing (at least compared to Cake or CI). Here’s a couple things I’m wondering about:

1) If I have an ‘add station’ form (using a Station model). In the form, there will be a drop down list of ‘Companies’ (from Company Model). Station belongsTo Company (Station has a foreign key of company_id).

How do I go about generating the drop down list? Should the Php code used to pull the data be stored in the model, or should it just be a line in the form?

2) I also have the following database tables:

station
- id
- location_id

location
- id
- state_id
- city_id

state
- id
- state

city
- id
- city

For right now, in the same form as above, I wanted to have a ‘Location’ field, and then 2 drop downs for city and state. Whatever the user chooses, would then be stored in the location table as foreign key pairs. How would I go about doing that?

Answer 1

1) Look at my answer to this question for tips about the downdown (the key is CHtml::listData):

Does CDbcommand method queryAll() in yii return indexed entries only?

2) Is location just a relation table between state and city? Then just do a MANY_MANY relation() in your City and State models. The AdvancedAR extension makes life a little easier for managing MANY_MANY releationships.

Otherwise, just set up a Model for each of your tables, and add the appropriate relations() between them. Then in your form post action, create a new Location and set the state_id and city_id, and save() it.