Question

I’m working with a legacy database whose keys follow a convention, but not the cake convention, unfortunately, and I’ve bumped into something odd with the containable behavior — it’s pulling the wrong data. Here’s my setup:

TechnologyIncentive belongsTo...
  array(
    'Incentive' => array(
      'className'  => 'Incentive',
      'type'       => 'inner',
      'foreignKey' => false, # actually 'incentive_id', but we need to fool Cake
      'conditions' => array( 'TechnologyIncentive.incentive_id = Incentive.incentive_id' ),
    ),
    'Technology' => array(
      'className'  => 'Technology',
      'type'       => 'inner',
      'foreignKey' => false, # actually 'incentive_tech_id', but we need to fool Cake
      'conditions' => array( 'TechnologyIncentive.incentive_tech_id = Technology.incentive_tech_id' )
    ),
  );

You can see that I’ve had to fool Cake into working with my non-standard keys by setting the foreignKey to false and defining the link in my where clause. So far so good.

Now, when I try to run a query from the TechnologyIncentive model:

$this->find( 'all', array(
  'contain' => array( 'Incentive', 'Technology' ),
  'fields'  => array( 'Incentive.name', 'Technology.name', 'TechnologyIncentive.amount' ),
  'conditions' => array( /** conditions... */ )
);

Everything works great. Stuff is nicely contained and I get exactly what I’d expect. Then I need to include a TechnologyGroup, which hasMany Technology and things breakdown for some reason.

Now my contain option looks like this:

'contain' => array( 'Incentive', 'Technology' => array( 'TechnologyGroup' ) )

And what I get back is an Incentive record contains an incentive record. That’s not entirely surprising since I’m specifying a few fields in one place (the main fields option) and implicitly all fields in the contain option, but what’s really weird to me is that they’re different incentives. The “contained” incentive is just wrong.

Inspecting the SQL, it looks like the query was run with no effective where clause at all, so everything is being pulled and then artificially limited to a single record. Note the difference between $result['Incentive']['incentive_id'] and $result['Incentive']['Incentive']['incentive_id'].

Array
(
  [Incentive] => Array
    (
      [incentive_id] => MD046
      [name] => Incentive name
      [category] => 
      [Incentive] => Array
        (
          [incentive_id] => AK004
          [code] => AK04F
          [version] => 2
          [category] => Incentive Category
        )

    )
)

Has anyone ever bumped into this? It’s not a problem until I want to retrieve an extended record (TechnologyGroup). Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

It looks like this was directly attributed to the non-standard keys. The Containable behavior, more so, it seems, that other elements of Cake really wants the convention followed. Moreover, some of the key associations included a double underscore (__) in the field name and that caused other problems.

Kids, don’t try this at home. Follow the conventions, even if it means manipulating a legacy database.