I’m creating a form in cakephp that has a typical HABTM relationship. Let’s say that I’m developing an order form with a coupon code. From a logic point of view, I need to accept a text-entry for the coupon code, so the incoming data would not be the proper primary key, but rather a different field.
I would then need to validate that data, and retrieve the proper primary key id, and then update the orders_coupons table with that coupon_id, and order_id.
When using a select box the value would always be the proper coupon_id, but where is the appropriate location for me to put the logic to handle this? Should I modify the data using beforeSave?
your question isn’t very clear b/c it sounds like you can both specify the coupon via a select box or in just a free form text box.
My inclination is to add a new method to the Model that would update the record with the “human readable key”. So the function would first read the coupon_id from the DB, and then do the update.