Question

I’ve made a footer element that will be shown throughout my entire website.

The content of this page needs to be filled up with data from a certain model, on every page it is shown.

$sponsors = $this->Sponsor->find('all',
        array('conditions' => array("NOT" => array("Sponsor.logo_id" => null))));

But where is the best place to define this? I thought in the app_controler, but how to do so isn’t exactly clear to me.

Answer 1

In your AppController‘s beforeFilter or possibly beforeRender (I never really noticed the difference); making sure your AppController has access to Sponsor model.

// app_controller.php
function beforeFilter() {
    parent::beforeFilter();
    $this->loadModel('Sponsor');
    $this->Sponsor->recursive = -1; // adjust to return more/less data
    $sponsors = $this->Sponsor->find('all',
        array('conditions' => array("NOT" => array("Sponsor.logo_id" => null))));
    $this->set('sponsors', $sponsors);
}

You now have access to $sponors in any view.

And it may be best to place the data in to an element and cache it for a suitable amount of time to avoid constantly having to query the database (depending on other factors such as page load/other intensive queries etc.