How can I limit the maximum number of HABTM and hasMany records SAVED per parent Model in CakePHP?

Question

I'm rebuilding one of my sites using the CakePHP Framework (awesome!), and I need to limit the number of hasMany and HABTM records that a Model can have. Let's say for "Profile hasMany Image," I want to limit a profile to only 10 images.

I know I can easily accomplish this using the Find method with 'count,' but I'm wondering if there's a property that can be set somewhere that I overlooked. I've looked at the CakePHP documentation and Googled a bit, haven't seen anything, but I'm always running across little CakePHP secrets now and then.

Answer 1

The only thing that might make it slightly easier than $this->Model->find('count') is to implement counterCache.

http://book.cakephp.org/view/1033/counterCache-Cache-your-count

But I don't think this works with HABTM relationships. I'm fairly certain there's no built-in way to limit the number of associated records with a simple model attribute or anything like that. The amount of code you'll have to write is fairly trivial though.

Answer 2

I wrote a HabtmCounterCache Behavior for CakePHP. Let me know what you think.