Save without updating the 'modified' field - cakephp

Question

I'm working on a new project using CakePHP 3.0.
I'm using the authentication component and whenever a user logs in, I'm updating the value of the field visited.
UsersController:
public function login() {
if ($this->request->is('post')) {
$user = $this->Auth->identify();
if ($user) {
$this->Auth->setUser($user);
$this->Users->setVisited($user['id']);
return $this->redirect($this->Auth->redirectUrl());
}
$this->Flash->error('Your username or password is incorrect.');
}
}
UsersTable:
public function setVisited($id) {
$user = $this->findById($id)->first();
$user->visited = Time::now();
if($this->save($user)) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
Now, I would like to do this save without updating the value of the field modified. I've tried the approach used in previous versions of cake:
$user->modified = false;
It doesn't work though, throwing and error: Call to a member function format() on a non-object because datetime fields are now treated as objects I guess.
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Paul

Answer 1

You have a couple ways of doing this. What you want is actually to avoid calling callbacks when saving the entity. For those cases you have updateAll
$this->updateAll(['visited' => Time::now()], ['id' => $id]);
You can also do the same as before, but you will need to disable the Timestamp behavior before saving:
$this->behaviors()->unload('Timestamp');
I would recommend using updateAll