CakePHP foreignKey not being saved in belongsTo relation

Question

I have a table profiles and a table users, and profiles has a belongsTo relationship with users. On my profiles/edit view, I have a dropdown of existing users to select from.

However, the users.id is not being saved in profiles.user_id, as I would expect.

ProfilesController.php -> edit:

$this->set('users', $this->Profile->User->find('list'));

And in View -> Profiles -> edit.ctp

echo $this->Form->input('User');

Running debug($this->request); in the controller shows that the proper values are being sent back to the controller. The save action looks like:

if ($this->request->is('post') || $this->request->is('put')) {
    if ($this->Profile->save($this->request->data)) {
        $this->Session->setFlash(__('The profile has been saved'));
    } else {
        $this->Session->setFlash(__('The profile could not be saved. Please, try again.'));
    }
}

In the returned data:

data => array(
    'Profile' => array(
        'User' => '3',
                    ...

Answer 1

This syntax is wrong:

echo $this->Form->input('User');

You don't have a field named "User" in your Profile model. This should be:

echo $this->Form->input('user_id');