Saving information in "sub" model in CakePHP

Question

I've got a simple CakePHP site (1.2). I've got a page where you can edit and save a Person. So I have a Person model and controller.

Each Person has none or more comments, in the comment table. So I have a Comment model, and I have a hasMany association on my Person model to the Comment model. View is working great.

My question is, on the view Person page, I have an add comment button. How should this work? Should I expect the Person controller to include a save for the comment record, or create a comment controller and save it outside of it's association for a person?

I'm experienced with PHP, but brand new to Cake.

Any ideas? I think I'm just missing something obvious, but I'm not sure what to do. I feel like if this was PHP I would reference the Person_id in my add comment form, and thus use a separate controller, but I feel like having a controller for a simple Model is useless, since Comments are only edited in the context of a Person record.

Ideas?

Answer 1

I'm not a CakePHP expert, but I still think it would make sense to have your own controller. From what I remember from doing one of those CakePHP blog tutorials is, that you need to link the comments and the post in the comment model. This is some of the code I have from it:

class Comment extends AppModel
{
  var $name = ‘Comment’;
  var $belongsTo = array(‘Person’);
}

And then you need a controller (comments_controller.php):

class CommentsController extends AppController
{
  var $name = ‘Comments’;
  var $scaffold;
}

Some SQL:

CREATE TABLE comments (
  id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  author VARCHAR(50),
  comment TEXT,
  person_id INT,
  created DATETIME DEFAULT NULL,
  modified DATETIME DEFAULT NULL
);

The $scaffold creates a CRUD application for you, so when you go to /comments in your browser you can create, read, update and delete comments. So, as you see, there is not much involved here. All you need is your database tables and a little logic to provide person_id.

To save a comment (in your Person/view):

<h2>Add comment</h2>
<?php
echo $form->create(‘Comment’, array(‘action’=>‘add/’.$person[‘Person’][‘id’]);
echo $form->input(‘author’);
echo $form->input(‘content’);
echo $form->submit(‘Add comment’);
echo $form->end();
?>

And in your CommentsController:

function add($id = NULL) {
  if (!empty($this->data)) {
    $this->data['Comment']['person_id'] = $id;
    $this->data['Comment']['id'] = '';
    if ($this->Comment->save($this->data)) {
      $this->Session->setFlash('Commented added');
      $this->redirect($this->referer());
    }
  }
}

So you basically overwrite the standard add action, which Cake adds by itself. Hope that makes sense now. Also, you might need a route so it picks up /comments/add/ID. I don't know about this part. :)

Answer 2

Eureka! Thanks, this works, and is making sense.