cakephp paginate model with multiple association

Question

I have three tables : Units, Offers and Agents with following associations

• Unit hasMany Offers

• Offer belongsTo Agent

  When I paginate Unit table I get all the units and all the corresponding Offers for each unit , but not the Agent that offer belongs to. Ex:
   Unit1
    offer1
    offer2
   Unit2
    offer1
    offer2
    offer3
  ...

And I want to have something like this:

 Unit1
  offer1
   agent1
  offer2
   agent2
 Unit2
  offer1
   agent1
  offer2
   agent2
  offer3
   agent3
....

How to do it?

Answer 1

The easiest solution is to increase the recursive of the Model before calling the paginage.

$this->Unit->recursive = 1; //or more

But you should be very careful, because you could call the same Model twice. Extra advice here: Try to unbind Unnecessary models before using this. Again - be very careful, because this could slowdown the app.

Answer 2

Using the Containable behaviour should get you there. I never use recursive now.

Alternatively, it can sometimes be helpful to create a database view across the tables of interest. This will make paging a lot simpler and will allow you to specify exactly what data you require (avoiding unnecessary data transfer).