Question

I’m new to CakePHP and hope someone could help me with this one. I can’t solve it on my own.

I have a table ‘games’, with the following columns:

- id
- date

And a second table ‘reports’, with the following columns:

- id
- report
- game_id (foreign key)

Game hasOne report and report belongsTo game.

I’m trying to build a form that adds a report to an existing game. Whenever I add a new report, it creates a duplicate record. I have read that if Cake doesn’t know the id, this will happen. And when I debug, the id-field is empty.

This is my aim: If there isn’t a report for a game yet, an add-link will appear and if a report exists for a specific game, there’s update link. Or there’s respectively one link to a form that adds or edits report depending on if there is/isn’t one. How this can be done?

I have read that in beforeSave() -function, you could specify when create and when edit a record. I don’t have an idea how this can be done.

Currently my only solution is to validate the form and set game_id isUnique and to inform to the user that there’s already a report with this game_id.

Big thank you to anyone, who could help me with this!

Answer 1

You could just check beforehand.

if ($this->Report->hasAny(array('game_id' => $this->data['Report']['game_id']))) {
  // update
  $existing = $this->Report->find('first', array(
    'conditions' => array(
      'game_id' => $this->data['Report']['game_id']
    )
  ));
  $this->Report->id = $existing['Report']['id'];
} else {
  $this->Report->create();
}
// save or update
$this->Report->save($this->data);