Question

What is do you think is the best way to create a procedure where request is made and if there are any existing id in the database, update if not create a new one.

I was using something like below and it seems to work but is there are better way?

$id = $this->User->findByFacebookId($facebook);

                   if($id){
                       $this->User->set(array(
                          'facebook_id' => $facebook,
                           'longitude' => $longitude,
                           'latitude' => $latitude,
                           'firstname' => $firstname,
                           'surname' => $surname
                       ));
                       $this->User->id = $id['User']['id'];
                       $this->User->save($this->data);

Answer 1

Yup, CakePHP basically does this by default. If your data has no id field an INSERT statement is issued, whereas if there is an id field it issues UPDATE ... WHERE ID = ?.

Just to show how simply this can be done, below is a way to do the same without even calling Model::set() or updating the Model::id property:

    // get existing record (so we can get value of `id` field)
    $existing = $this->User->findByFacebookId($facebook);

    // if record exists, map data to correct record `id`
    if ($existing) {
        $this->data['User']['id'] = $existing['User']['id'];
    }

    // save data to table (`id` determines if INSERT or UPDATE)
    $this->User->save($this->data);