CakePHP - HABTM - 将数据从多个表发送到视图

Question

Scenario:

3 tables:
restaurants
cuisines
features

2 join tables:
cuisines_restaurants
features_restaurants

Question:

What is the best way to get data for a single restaurant from my controller to the view which includes not only the restaurant data, but also the cuisines and features that it has.

I have it working with this:

$restaurant = $this->Restaurant->find('all', array('conditions' => array('Restaurant.id' => $id)));
$this->set('restaurant', $restaurant);

And I'm calling it in the view like this:

echo "<span class='label'>Name:</span> " . $restaurant[0]['Restaurant']['name'] . "<br />";
echo "<span class='label'>Cuisine:</span> ";
    $cuisineList = "";
    foreach($restaurant[0]['Cuisine'] as $cuisine) {
        $cuisineList .= $cuisine['name'] . ", ";
    }
    echo substr($cuisineList,0,-2) . "<br />";

(and repeat for Features)

But this seems overkill, since in all the Cake tutorials I see, the view method in the controller just has:

$this->set('restaurant', $this->Restaurant->read(null, $id));

Then they call it like this:

echo $restaurant['Restaurant']['name'];
...etc

Again - it IS working - I just want to know if there's a better way - the way I'm currently doing it seems sloppy compared to all the other slick things Cake does for me! :)

Answer 1

Your working code uses Model::find('all'), but when you want to retrieve just one Restaurant's data, you want to use Model::find('first'). I think you'll find if you change the first parameter of your call from 'all' to 'first', you'll get the data you want in the format you want.

---

Somewhat tangentially, there is quite literally no difference between the data returned by the two following calls:

$data = $this->Restaurant->find('first', array(
    'conditions'=>array('Restaurant.id'=>$id)
));

or

$data = $this->Restaurant->read(null,$id);

Model::read is essentially a wrapper for Model::find('first'), though it also sets the model's internal state a bit (setting the Model::id and Model::data properties before returning data retrieved with Model::find('first')).