Question

When linking data in different tables together using foreign ids, I often end up writing inelegant code to get the information I need. Here is an example:

Say I have a table Message, with the following fields:

id, touserId, fromuserId, title, message

touserId and fromuserId refer to the id of the User objects that are sending and receiving the message respectively.

Say I want to show all the messages sent to a particular user. I end up writing something like this in my view – which I know is bad!

<?
$messages=Message::model()->findAllByAttributes(array("touserId"=>Yii::app()->user->userid));
foreach ($messages as $message) {   
$fromuser=User::model()->findAllByAttributes(array("id"=>$message->fromId));
?>
<div>
<h4><?=$message->title;?></h4>
<p>From: <?=$fromuser->name'?>
<p><?$message->body;?></p>
</div>
<?
}
?>

Is there a more elegant way to access the information from related records (in this case the name of the user sending the message?)

Answer 1

In your Message model, you can do this:

public function relations() {
    return array(
        'name' => array(self::HAS_ONE, 'User', 'fromuserId')
    )
}

Alternatively, you could modify your model to include a JOIN so you get the user names.