Question

If I have a person model with first_name and last_name, how do I create and display a full_name? I would like to display it at the top of my Edit and View views (i.e. “Edit Frank Luke”) and other places. Simply dropping echoes to first_name and last_name isn’t DRY.

I’m sorry if this is a very simple question, but nothing has yet worked.

Thank you,
Frank Luke

Edit for clarity: Okay, I have a function on the person model.

function full_name() {
    return $this->Person->first_name . ' ' . $this->Person->last_name;
}

In the view, I call

echo $person['Person']['full_name']

This gives me a notice that I have an undefined index. What is the proper way to call the function from the view? Do I have to do it in the controller or elsewhere?

Answer 1

If what you are wanting is just to display a full name, and never need to do any database actions (comparisons, lookups), I think you should just concatenate your fields in the view.

This would be more aligned with the MVC design pattern. In your example you just want to view information in your database in a different way.

Since the action of concatenating is simple you probably don’t save much code by placing it in a separate function. I think its easiest to do just in the view file.

If you want to do more fancy things ( ie Change the caps, return a link to the user ) I would recommend creating an element which you call with the Users data.