Question

I’m having a strange issue with a CakePHP 2.1.1 Project.
The issue is that if I call a find() on the Competition model (in the following code), right after it I call a custom method in another model the operation fails with the following error:

Error: SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'getAddedPlayersIds' at line 1

SQL Query: getAddedPlayersIds 

My CompetitionsController::view() code is as follows:

public function view($id = null) {
        $this->layout = 'competition';
        $this->Competition->id = $id;
        if (!$this->Competition->exists()) {
            throw new NotFoundException(__('Invalid competition'));
        }

        $active = $this->Competition->field('active', array('id' => $id));
        if (!$active) {
        $this->redirect(array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'competition_inactive'));
        }
            //THIS IS WHERE IT BECOMES STRANGE:
        $competition = $this->Competition->find('first', array('conditions' => array('Competition.id' => $id)));

        $addedPlayersIds = $this->CompetitionsPlayer->getAddedPlayersIds($id);

            //SOME CODE INTENTIONALLY REMOVED HERE!!!       

        $this->set('playerShops', $playerShops);    
        $this->set('messages', $messages);
        $this->set('competition', $this->Competition->read(null, $id));
            //render() IS CALLED FOR A SPECIFIC REASON
        $this->render();
    }

This is what the CompetitionsPlayer::getAddedPlayersIds() method looks like:

public function getAddedPlayersIds($competitionId = null){
        if(!isset($competitionId)) {
            return false;
        }

        $this->displayField = 'player_id';
        return $this->find('list', array('conditions' => array('competition_id' => $competitionId)));
    }

I initially thought that it’s somehow breaking, because of the variable name I’m assigning the return of the Model::find() operation to, which is ‘competition’, but what’s more interesting is that if I move the Competition::find() call after the CompetitionsPlayer::getAddedPlayersIds() it works!
Furthermore if I rename the variable it will sometimes work, and sometimes not…!?
I still can’t figure out which is when because I currently have no time to research this further.
Notice that according to the debug information the query that gets executed over the database is:

getAddedPlayersIds

which is the name of the function I’m calling!

As I mentioned I already know the workaround for this – just swap the two calls.But what if the first was to be before the seconds and there was no other way to implement the task at hand??
All I want now is to know why this happens?

Answer 1

It turns out that when using Model::field() the function’s implementation sets recursive to -1 or 0. The CakePHP core code is:

public function field($name, $conditions = null, $order = null) {
//Some code ommited
    if ($this->recursive >= 1) {
        $recursive = -1;
    } else {
        $recursive = $this->recursive;
    }
//Some code ommited
}

So as explained this is the issue. I understand that this is a performance optimization, but I am not sure if this is a feature or a problem. To me this is strange behavior.