CakePHP containable behaviour not firing

Question

First time using Cake and its containable behaviour, but it's not working as expected ... or at all.

I'm trying to obtain a list of accessories for a product. Product model HABTM products (alias 'ProductRelation'). Join table is products_products which has two product ids - product_id and related_id. It's against this I want to pull the list of accessories (products driven from the related_id column) for a given product_id

In my Product model, I've added $actsAs = array('Containable');

And in my controller, a quick test of containable using reference from the cookbook fails to contain products at all, even without conditions.

debug($this->Product->find('all', array('contain' => 'ProductRelation')));

.. returns an array of every product in the db, with ALL related models - images, content tabs, ratings, reviews, pricing, etc I haven't tried applying any 'conditions' against this because the call as written should limit data to the product and it's ProductRelation data, according to the cookbook ...

Any tips?

Answer 1

It seems like you have recursive on. Try using the following:

debug($this->Product->find('all', array(
    'contain' => 'ProductRelation',
    'recursive' => -1
)));

If that works for you, you should start adding containable to the AppModel class and setting the recursive property to -1. This will ensure you only ever get the results you request.

NB: Cake does not join for HABTM, so you can not use ProductRelation in any conditions.