yiiadmin - many-to-many in yii-framework admin interface

Question

Hi, guys!

I am currently extending yii-s admin extension, yiiadmin.

What would be the easiest way to get a listBox multiple-select field in model-create view, that would display many-to-many relation, for example I have a 'pivot' table that holds these article-category relationships, along with Article and Category tables.

I already have these relations defined in models, and I even managed to get some other relations into list view, like Author.name acquired through author_id field in Article table.

Now I want the Article creation form to contain multiple select listBox that would save into this pivot table automatically multiple choices of categories the Article belongs to.

Those would be, therefore, multiple entries/rows into article_category pivot table by one Article submission.

At the same time, the Article table itself does not contain any field that refers to category. The pivot table therefore picks up article's id attribute and connects it with categorie's (another model/table) id and makes a row out of this.

So, for example, I have these tables/models:

Article >>> id | title | author | text

---

Category >>> id | name | description

---

ArticleCategory >>> id | article_id | category_id

---

And I want to populate this third pivot table with multiple rows from multiple select listBox from the Article create view/form of yiiadmin (often through only one submission).

I also want to automatically render category.name from the Category table into this listbox, appropriately related to category id-s so that I can show names from category table, and by choice & submission populate pivot table with id-s of a category (therefore not names)

Is this possible, and what would be the way to do this?

Answer 1

Try this extension to more easily save MANY_MANY relationships:
http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/cadvancedarbehavior/
(the gii-template-collection uses this and provides a CRelated widget to create populated Relation form elements for you, it works pretty good I've tried it: http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/gii-template-collection/)

This one claims to do something similar with MANY-to-MANY relationships: http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/save-relations-ar-behavior/

Also, it's fairly easy to write the code yourself. Just populate a CHtml::listBox with the models it's related to, then in the action iterate through them and add the relationships to the 'pivot' table with some simple SQL. Or create a model for the pivot table and you use regular save() AR methods too. You can do this stuff in the afterSave() model event as well, instead of the controller action.