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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T01:06:33+00:00

I’m currently mucking about with CakePHP, deciding if I’ll use it in an upcoming

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I’m currently mucking about with CakePHP, deciding if I’ll use it in an upcoming web application.

The problem is, I’ve got several tables which at some point share relevant data with each other. If I were to write all the code myself I would use an SQL query using rather a lot of different joins and subqueries. But from what I understand CakePHP only supports joins between two tables.

So for example, I have Users, Profile, Rank, Rating tables and I want to get the profile, rank and ratings of one particular user. CakePHP will do the trick by using multiple, separate SELECT statements. But this would be possible using one query with multiple joins. Performance is expected to be quite important, so not being too wasteful with SQL queries is a major perquisite.

I’ve found two hacks (one behaviour and one using bindModel) and a similar StackOverflow thread.

I’m undecided whether to use the behaviour or the bindModel hack. Could anybody shed any light as to what is the best approach – viz. what integrates best in the overall CakePHP structure (are features like pagination still available)? Or is there another approach which is ultimately better. The SO thread mentions a method using containables.

Hope I’m not wrong in opening a separate question for this, but the older thread lists some solutions, but the answer isn’t that clear to me for the aforementioned reasons.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The easiest way to do this is to not bother with reducint the sql queries and to implement some form of caching.

    The next solution – skipping over the Containable behavior since it doesn’t work to reduce your queries is to do some ad-hoc joins in the find calls directly. Pushing these into the model so that you can call them from a central place is recommended. The good article on this technique is on the bakery here: http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/quick-tip-doing-ad-hoc-joins-in-model-find

    The best solution I have found to date is Rafael Bandeira’s Linkable behavior : http://blog.rafaelbandeira3.com/2008/11/16/linkable-behavior-taking-it-easy-in-your-db/ which allows you to use a custom key in the options array that defines the fields and relationships to join on in a clear fashion and uses the technique described in 1 to use joins instead of sequential queries.

    Good luck with your project.

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