How to find by conditions in two joining tables in CakePHP - cakephp

Question

In my CakePHP app I have three tables:
Businesses, Towns and Categories.
A business can belong to multiple towns and multiple categories so I have created joining tables and hasMany and belongsTo relationships. Everything works fine when finding businesses by either Town or Category by using the Town or Category model to search, but I am completely stuck when I want to search for businesses in a certain town AND a certain category, eg. Plumbers in London.
The associations just don't seem to work when searching with the Business model and I get column not found errors when trying to use the associated tables. I would think that this would be along the lines of what needs to be done, but I can't get it to work:
$this->set('listings', $this->Business->find('all', array(
'conditions' => array(
'Business.approved' => 1,
'BusinessesCategory.category_id' => $id,
'BusinessesTown.town_id' => $town_id,
'Business.sasite' => 1
)

Answer 1

You need to join the tables to do that.
I will put above a example how has to work with category and you can do the town yourself.
$this->Business->find("all", array(
"joins" => array(
array(
"table" => "businness_categories",
"alias" => "BusinessesCategory",
"type" => "LEFT",
"conditions" => array(
"Businesses.id = BusinessesCategory.business_id"
)
),
array(
"table" => "categories",
"alias" => "Category",
"type" => "LEFT",
"conditions" => array(
"BusinessesCategory.category_id = Category.id"
)
)
),
'conditions' => array(
'Business.approved' => 1,
'Category.id' => $id,
)
));
You also could use a behavior to do that for you:
https://github.com/Scoup/SuperJoin

Answer 2

Hi I had a very similar setup and the same problem. This is how I would solve your problem:
As you dont give away to much of your code I make some assumptions:
- You implemented your search method in the BusinessController
- Your search argument for the town is stored in vaiable $where and the one for Category is stored in $what
Code if you only have conditions for one table
$this->Businesses->Town->recursive = -1;
....
$options['joins'] = array(
array('table' => 'towns',
'alias' => 'Town',
'type' => 'inner',
'conditions' => array(
'Business.town_id = Town.id',
)
)
);
$options['conditions'] = array(
'Town.townName' => $where
);
$result = $this->Business->find('all', $options);
Code if you have conditions for two table
$this->Businesses->Town->recursive = -1;
$this->Businesses->Category->recursive = -1;
....
$options['joins'] = array(
array('table' => 'towns',
'alias' => 'Town',
'type' => 'inner',
'conditions' => array(
'Business.town_id = Town.id',
)
),
array('table' => 'categories',
'alias' => 'Category',
'type' => 'inner',
'conditions' => array(
'Business.category_id = category.id',
)
)
);
$options['conditions'] = array(
'Town.townName' => $where,
'Category.categoryName' => $what
);
$result = $this->Business->find('all', $options);

Answer 3

You can use
$this->Business->find('all', array(
'conditions' => array(
'AND' => array(
'BusinessesTown.town_id' => $town_id,
'BusinessesCategory.category_id' => $id
)
),
'recursive' => 2
));