CakePHP JSON API containable question

Question

right now I have controllers/actions that do standard retrieval of model/associated model data. My actions currently just pass the variables to the views to pick and choose which values to display to the user via HTML.

I want to extend and reuse these functions for the case where a mobile device is making a call to grab the JSON format version of the data. I am using Router:parseExtensions("json") and that all works fine.

My main question is how to handle data size. Right now even a User model has many, many associated models and recursive relationships. As of now I am not using contain to cut out the unnecessary data before I pass it to the view, b/c the view will take the elements it wants and it won't affect the HTML size.

But for my JSON views, I just format it and return the whole thing, which makes it extremely large. My current thought process is I just need to case it to use containable in the case of JSON, but I was hoping there was a more elegant solution? Or is this the cakey way to do it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Actually, using containable and fine tuning your query is a very elegant solution. Even if your view does not use the actual data, you put unnecessary load on your database by adding data / joins you don't need.

Try and limit your query and relations by using both Containable and fine tuning the relationships in your models and paginator calls.

It is also recommended that you move most of your find calls to the model layer. They will be re-usable, easier to test and overall more Cake-ish.