Question

I want the user to be able to choose a restaurant from a dropdown list. I’m achieving this by the simple:

echo $this->Form->input(
    'Restaurant', array('multiple'=>false, array('empty' => true)));

The issue I have is: some restaurants have duplicate names, and I need a way for the user to know which is which. I’d like to have the ID and/or address within the select options like:

<li value='62'>McDonalds (1234 Happy St) - #62</li>
<li value='63'>McDonalds (9876 French Fry Ln) - #63</li>
...etc

Is there a way to do this? I’m obviously capable of doing it w/ normal HTML, but… would be nice to stay in CakePHP.

Thanks ahead of time for any thoughts/suggestions/direction!

Answer 1

When you load your restaurants you’re actually getting an array like this

array (
  ID => NAME,
  ID => NAME
)

Basically, it’s an associated array with the ID as the key and the display field as the value. So as long as you modify that array via the find operation or via normal PHP array iteration, you can achieve your goal.

EDIT

So your answer is CakePHP VirtualFields

In your model you define it as

var $virtualFields = array(    
    'rest_unique_name' => 'CONCAT(Restaurant.first_name, " ", Restaurant.address)'
);

In your controller you do this

   $opts   = array(
            'fields'    => array('id', 'rest_unique_name')
   );
   $restaurants  = $this->Restaurant->find('list', $opts);