CakePHP 4 Saving Data Twice - cakephp

Question

CakePHP is somehow saving the same data twice. For some reason I want to implement this add method such that $dummy is saved right away as someone goes directly to domain.com/recordings/add
It looks pretty straight forward and I've been scratching my head. I've checked for validation errors; I've tried disabling validation; I've tried using patchEntity() instead.
Though, one strange thing is that, if you go to domain.com/recordings/add by hitting the add recording button in domain.com/recordings/index (instead of typing the url out on the browser), the data is saved just once.
Controller:
public function add()
{
$dummy = [
"user_id" => 1,
"title" => "tgfbthgdthb",
"body" => "rgcvfghfhdxcgb",
"published" => 0,
];
$recording = $this->Recordings->newEntity($dummy);
$this->Recordings->save($recording);
}
Model/table:
public function initialize(array $config): void
{
parent::initialize($config);
$this->setTable('recordings');
$this->setDisplayField('title');
$this->setPrimaryKey('id');
$this->addBehavior('Timestamp');
$this->belongsTo('Users', [
'foreignKey' => 'user_id',
'joinType' => 'INNER',
]);
$this->hasMany('Words', [
'foreignKey' => 'recording_id',
]);
}
Model/entity:
protected $_accessible = [
'user_id' => true,
'title' => true,
// 'slug' => true,
'body' => true,
'published' => true,
'created' => true,
'modified' => true,
'user' => true,
'words' => true,
];
The view:
<?php
/**
* #var \App\View\AppView $this
* #var \App\Model\Entity\Recording $recording
*/
?>
<div class="row">
<aside class="column">
<div class="side-nav">
<h4 class="heading"><?= __('Actions') ?></h4>
<?= $this->Html->link(__('List Recordings'), ['action' => 'index'], ['class' => 'side-nav-item']) ?>
</div>
</aside>
<div class="column-responsive column-80">
<div class="recordings form content">
<?= $this->Form->create($recording) ?>
<fieldset>
<legend><?= __('Add Recording') ?></legend>
<?php
echo $this->Form->control('user_id', ['options' => $users]);
echo $this->Form->control('title');
echo $this->Form->control('body');
echo $this->Form->control('published');
?>
</fieldset>
<?= $this->Form->button(__('Submit')) ?>
<?= $this->Form->end() ?>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Answer 1

Do not try to accommodate to people's lazyness, do not allow them to save data by simply visiting a URL, ie via a GET request, that's just going to cause trouble, and on top of that it's bad application design.
Implement at least a proper safeguard that only saves data for POST requests.
Browsers may issue multiple requests in various scenarios, from preflight OPTIONS requests to weird quirks, like for example Firefox aborting the request if doesn't find any encoding information in the first x bytes of response data, and then issuing a new request that assumes a specific encoding for the response.
public function add()
{
if ($this->request->is('post')) {
// save data here
}
}