Question

Using the example in the Cookbook:
http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/behaviors/tree.html

If you debug() this you get a flat array() of category(id => name)

Which is fine for most purposes, but if you wanted to create navigation based on this and had a slug for the URL, rather than the id, you’re out of luck.

I’m aware that I could use $this->Category->find(‘threaded’) in the controller to get all fields but it lacks the convenience of the flat list because I have to create a recursive function to generate the links using the slug, exactly what I’d hoped to avoid.

So what’s the best way to get the additional Category.slug field I need in the view?

Answer 1

CakePHP’s generateTreeList() method allows you to choose the keys and values that are returned. If, for example, you wished to return a list that had the slug as the key and the link text as the value, you could use the $keyPath and $valuePath parameters to make it so:

$data = $this->Category->generateTreeList(null, "{n}.Category.slug", "{n}.Category.text", '_');
debug($data); die;

might produce:

array(
    ["my-categories"] =>  "My Categories",
    ["fun"] =>  "_Fun",
    ["sport"] =>  "__Sport",
    ["surfing"] =>  "___Surfing",
    ["skating"] => "___Skating",
    ["friends"] =>  "__Friends",
    ["gerald"] =>  "___Gerald",
    ["gwendolyn"] =>  "___Gwendolyn",
    ["work"] =>  "_Work",
    ["trips"] => "__Trips",
    ["national"] => "___National",
    ["international"] => "___International",
    ["other-peoples-categories"] => "Other People's Categories",
    ["extreme-fishing"] =>  "_Extreme fishing"
)