Saving new associated records in CakePHP - cakephp

Question

So I have a Message model. When a message is created, I want to create new Recipient records. (Message hasMany Recipient, Recipient belongsTo Message).
The intent is that the message_id field in these associated records gets populated automagically with the new Message id.
I've tried to format the data every which way, and am aware of saveAll and saveAssociated methods, but nothing seems to work... Here's what I assumed would work:
Data passed on to save:
[Message] => array
(
[subject] => Foo bar
[body] => Blah blah blah.
)
[Recipient] => array
(
[0] => array
(
[user_id] => 1
)
[1] => array
(
[user_id] => 5
)
[2] => array
(
[user_id] => 6
)
)
Using saveMany, saveAll, saveAssociated didn't seem to make a difference (even with 'deep' set to true).

Answer 1

A few things:
1) The Message being created was a new record. I realized after that I didn't have $this->Message->create() in my controller. Now, I've since tried without and it works fine but I believe it's best practice to include it.
2) Since I need to save multiple associated records, I have to use saveAll or saveMany but doing so was causing extra blank rows to be added, since the main record was not numerically indexed (which is what saveAll wants).
So here's some code from my controller:
if ($this->request->is('post')) {
$this->Message->create();
if ($this->Message->saveAll($data, array('deep' => true))) {
// code here
}
}
And here is how my data is structured:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[Message] => Array
(
[subject] => Foo
[body] => bar
[Recipient] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[user_id] => 1
)
[1] => Array
(
[user_id] => 6
)
[2] => Array
(
[user_id] => 38
)
)
)
)
)
This will create a new Message and properly associate the newly created Recipient records.