Question

Question Overview:

I want to be able to edit an item (a restaurant in this case) and allow the user to select multiple options (cuisines) that use a table of connections to access a list of the options/cuisines.

Question Details:

I have 3 tables:

restaurants:          id, name, address, phone...etc
cuisines:             id, name, url_name
cuisine_connections:  id, restaurant_id, cuisine_id

As you can imagine, the cuisine_connections table is a list of connections between the cuisines, and the restaurants. (If anyone has a better solution for this I’m all ears).

model/restaurant.php:

    var $hasMany = array(
    'CuisineConnection' => array(
        'className' => 'CuisineConnection',
        'foreignKey' => 'restaurant_id',
        'dependent' => false
    )
);

model/cuisine.php

    var $hasMany = array(
    'CuisineConnection' => array(
        'className' => 'CuisineConnection',
        'foreignKey' => 'cuisine_id'
    )
);

model/cuisine_connection.php

var $belongsTo = array(
    'Cuisine' => array(
        'className' => 'Cuisine',
        'foreignKey' => 'restaurant_id',
        'dependent' => false
    ),
    'Restaurant' => array(
        'className' => 'Restaurant',
        'foreignKey' => 'restaurant_id'
    )
);

I’ve tried this so far:

controllers/restaurants_controller.php:

$this->set('cuisines', $this->Restaurant->CuisineConnection->Cuisine->find('list'));

admin_add.ctp:

echo $this->Form->input('cuisine_id', array('multiple'=>'checkbox'));

Answer 1

You could read this tutorial for undestand clearly about implementing many-to-many association in CakePhp. Beside that, the line code:

$this->set('cuisines', $this->Restaurant->CuisineConnection->Cuisine->find('list'));

has problems. I think that, depend on your description, you should list all the Cuisine for choosing with coresponding restaurant. The code should be replaced by:

$this->set('cuisines', $this->Cuisine->find('all'));