Question

Using CakePHP I’m getting multidimensional arrays and I can’t seem to figure out why sometimes I can access them via key and sometimes I can’t. For example I have an employee model with associated Plant information and find all correctly gets both sets of data and stores it in an array. The info is stored and accessed as $var['Emp'] and $var['Plant'] when I use Emp->find('all')

This gives a nice keyed array, like this:

$Employee = Array(
    [Plant] => Array(
            [0] => Array(
                 [ID]...

However for some employees (admins) they aren’t associated with lists of plants, so instead of using their accociated plant data, I need to give them a list of all plants period, so I use Plant->find('all'). The problem is the generated array is in a weird format as seen below:

$plants = Array(
    [0] => Array(
            [Plant] => Array(
                    [ID] =>...

So I can’t access $plants['Plant'], and I can’t use the top level array as my $Employee['Plant'] array. I know I could use a foreach and rewrite the $plants array to match the other format, but I have a whole site I’m converting to cake’s find('all') function so I would like to know why this difference is happening and how I can access the second array in a keyed fashion.

Answer 1

In the first case, you are getting data back for an Employee and it groups associated models using the Model name.
In the second case, you are getting back an array of all plants directly and that is just how CakePHP returns the objects. You need to iterate over the array to access each Plant object.

I hope this makes sense.