Help with CakePHP Model Relationships - cakephp

Question

Three simple tables...
Feedname (eg. News or
Events) which are the names of RSS
feeds.
Posts that belong to a
Feedname
User, that owns all
the posts
I want to use the Form helper to automatically give me a select box so that when I add a post I can select which Feedname to assign it to.
It seems like posts belong to both Feedname and User but I can't get the correct combination of belongsTo and hasMany in my model/ .php files. The select box for feedname is shown, but there is nothing in it. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
The tables look like this at the moment:
CREATE TABLE `feednames` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
`created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`modified` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;
CREATE TABLE `posts` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`title` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
`body` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,
`created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`modified` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`user_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
`feedname_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `foreign_key` (`user_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;
CREATE TABLE `users` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`username` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
`password` char(40) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL,
`group_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`created` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
`modified` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;
edit - adding the model .php files ...
class Feedname extends AppModel {
var $name = 'Feedname';
var $hasMany = array(
'Post' => array(
'className' => 'Post',
'foreignKey' => 'feedname_id',
'dependent' => false
)
);
}
class Post extends AppModel {
var $name = 'Post';
var $belongsTo = array(
'User' => array(
'className' => 'User',
'foreignKey' => 'user_id'
),
'Feedname' => array(
'foreignKey' => 'feedname_id'
)
);
}
class User extends AppModel {
var $name = 'User';
var $hasMany = array(
'Post' => array(
'className' => 'Post',
'foreignKey' => 'user_id',
'dependent' => false
)
);
}
edit - adding SQL dump ** ...
/posts/index.ctp:
SELECT COUNT(*) AS count FROM posts AS Post LEFT JOIN users AS User ON (Post.user_id = User.id) LEFT JOIN feednames AS Feedname ON (Post.feedname_id = Feedname.id) WHERE 1 = 1
SELECT Post.id, Post.title, Post.body, Post.created, Post.modified, Post.user_id, Post.feedname_id, User.id, User.username, User.password, User.group_id, User.created, User.modified, Feedname.id, Feedname.name, Feedname.created, Feedname.modified FROM posts AS Post LEFT JOIN users AS User ON (Post.user_id = User.id) LEFT JOIN feednames AS Feedname ON (Post.feedname_id = Feedname.id) WHERE 1 = 1 ORDER BY Post.created DESC LIMIT 10
Please note: /posts/add.ctp does not produce any SQL dump, so it's not getting the select box options from the database, this is what I'm trying to fix with proper model relationships.

Answer 1

Do you have something like this in your controller methods (e.g. the admin_add / admin_edit functions)?
$feednames = $this->Feedname->find('list');
$this->set('feednames', $feednames);
Cake should then automatically populate the select list with these values. Or you can manually set the values with:
$form->input('feedname_id', array('options' => $feednames));

Answer 2

So far I agree :
posts > belongs to > users
posts > belongs to > feednames
feednames > has many > posts
users > has many > posts
Just checking, but, did you actually insert data into your tables? Else it would be only logical that your select field is empty. Also, what does the Sql dump say in debug mode?