Toggling Associations in CakePHP Models

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Alright, associations in CakePHP are a wonderful thing. But sometimes you just want to turn them off for one single findAll() call because you don't need the bulk of related items. So since I didn't find any existing way of doing this I came up with my own one:

class CakeModel extends AppModel
{
function turnAssociationsOn()
{
$this->_tempRestoreVariables(array('_oneToOne', '_belongsToOther', '_oneToMany', '_manyToMany'));
}

function turnAssociationsOff()
{
$this->_tempSaveVariables(array('_oneToOne', '_belongsToOther', '_oneToMany', '_manyToMany'), array());
}

function _tempSaveVariables($variables, $replaceWith = NULL)
{
foreach ($variables as $nr => $variable)
{
$this->{$variable.'Tmp'} = @$this->{$variable};
$this->{$variable} = $replaceWith;
}
}

function _tempRestoreVariables($variables)
{
foreach ($variables as $nr => $variable)
{
$this->{$variable} = @$this->{$variable.'Tmp'};
unset($this->{$variable.'Tmp'});
}
}
}

For people who don't want to go into extending the Model class they it should work to copy the functions inside of CakeModel into their specific Model where they want to use them.

I hope this is helpful to somebody ...

Update: I fixed a little bug that will occur if you toggle associations for save() or generateFields(). The problem was I was replacing the association variables with NULL instead of array() which is their default value which can lead to some PHP warning here and there.
Important: This is a temporary fix. I talked to Nate and he is working on this feature for Bundt (Cake 1.0). In the new release there will be a parameter depth's for association that you can set to '0' if you want to deactivate them.

--Felix

&nsbp;

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cake baker » Toggling associations said on Jan 09, 2006:

[...] ThinkingPHP has published an idea how you can activate/deactivate associations for a findAll() call. Nice. There is also a RFC (request for comment) for integrating this feature into the core of CakePHP. [...]

gwoo said on Jan 20, 2006:

RC3 will have this fully implemented. look for recursive in the api.

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