CakePHP 2.x containable behavior conditions on deep associations - cakephp

Question

I have model relations like this:
Project hasMany SubProject hasMany Item
I want to set up a containable array so that I can find all of the Items which belong to a particular Project, and paginate the results. So, in my ItemsController I have:
public $paginate = array(
'Item' => array(
'limit' => 10,
'order' => array('
'Item.create_time' => 'desc'
),
'contain' => array(
'SubProject' => array(
'Project'
)
)
)
);
Somewhere, obviously, I need to place a condition like "SubProject.project_id = $pid", but nothing I've tried yields the correct results. The best I can manage is results that look like this:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[Item] => Array
(
[id] => 13
[file_name] => foo.tar.gz
.... other keys ...
[create_time] => 2013-01-23 14:59:49
[subProject_id] => 4
)
[SubProject] => Array
(
[id] => 4
[name] => foo
[project_id] => 2
..... other keys ....
[Project] => Array
(
)
)
)
[1] => Array
.....
Edit: It is quite correctly omitting the Project record that doesn't match; I want to skip any Item records with out a matching Project record.
It has crossed my mind to manually specify my joins, but I feel like that shouldn't be necessary.
It seems like this should be obvious, but alas, the solution escapes me.

Answer 1

I did eventually solve this problem, so I thought I'd explain what I did in the hope it might help someone else.
After reading this blog post by Mark Story (which is from the days of 1.2 but still relevant) I decided that the thing to do was create a custom find type in my Item model that binds the Project model directly. This gives a first-level association that Containable can filter correctly.
So, in the Items model, I have something like the following (see the documentation on custom find types).
public $findMethods = array('byProject' => true);
public function _findByProject($state, $query, $results=array()) {
if ($state == 'before') {
$this->bindModel(array(
'hasOne' => array(
'Project' => array(
'foreignKey' => false,
'conditions' => array('Project.id = SubProject.project_id')
)
)
));
return $query;
}
return $results;
}
Note that setting foreignKey to false is necessary to prevent CakePHP from trying to automatically use a non-existent database key. In the ItemsController, the pagination options now look like this:
public $paginate = array(
'Item' => array(
'findType' => 'byProject',
'limit' => 10,
'order' => array(
'Item.create_time' => 'desc'
),
'contain' => array(
'SubProject',
'Project'
),
'conditions' => array('Project.id' = $pid)
),
);
...where $pid is the id of the project to display. Some minor tweaks in the view code to accomodate the slightly different results array structure, and I was all set.

Answer 2

EDIT ===============
public $paginate = array(
'limit' => 10,
'order' => 'Item.create_time DESC', //'order' => array(''Item.create_time' => 'desc'),
'contain' => array(
'SubProject' => array(
'Project' => array(
'conditions' => array(
'id' => $project_id // Passed parameter
)
)
)
)
);
=================================================
Have you tried using conditions as in the following? Also, I did not write the 'order' section of the code the way you have it.
public $paginate = array(
'Item' => array(
'limit' => 10,
'order' => 'Item.create_time DESC', //'order' => array(''Item.create_time' => 'desc'),
'contain' => array(
'SubProject' => array(
'Project' => array(
'conditions' => array(
'id' => $project_id // Passed parameter
)
)
)
)
)
);