[SOLVED] Complex ordering in CakePHP using Containable

Complex ordering in CakePHP using Containable

I`m having a problem with the Containable behaviour.

I would like to know if there is any way to access the contained model attributes for operations like ordering.

For example, I have a model B which belongs to a Model A. I need to order objects of B using an attribute (integer) of A. It would be something like:

'contain' => array(
            'A' => array(
                'B' => array(
                    'order' => 'A.integer_attribute'
                )
            )
        )

I know that there are easier ways to do this without Containable, but for reasons which are not worth being detailed here, I need to use it. This is an abstract example, in truth model A belongs to other models and this is just a small part of a deep containable tree.

I'd be very glad with any help!

EDIT

OK, I'll try my best to describe the situation without being unclear:

I have 4 models: User, Category, Field and UserField, and their relationships are as follows:

Category hasMany User
Category hasMany Field
User hasMany UserField
Field hasMany UserField

The opposite of these relations are all belongsTo. The purpose here is that the user belongs to a category, which has many fields that he needs to fill with his information (city, state etc). The information he fills is stored in the UserField table, as each information needs to have its field and the user who provided it.

That said, I need to build a screen which displays, for each category, a list of users and their information. So, I retrieve all the categories and its fields, so I can build a table for each category. Each field has an attribute "no_order", which is the number that indicates the order in which the field appears.

At the same time, I need all of each category's users to display them correctly in the tables. Finally, and there's the problem, I need to have UserField objects ordered by the "no_order" of their respective fields, for each user. So I ended up with something like:

$categories = $this->Category->find('all', array(
        'order' => 'Category.name',
        'contain' => array(
            'Field',
            'User' => array(
                'UserField' => array(
                    'order' => 'Field.no_order'
                )
            )
        )
    ));

But this doesn't work, since UserField cannot reach its respective Field's no_order from there.

I apologize if this wasn't clear enough, but for anyone who would spend a little while reading this, I would be VERY grateful for your help!

Solution

I finally came up with a solution. I don't know how efficient it is, but there it goes:

'contain' => array(
            'Field',
            'User' => array(
                'User.privilege = "Solicitante"'
                'UserField' => array(
                    'order' => '(SELECT f.no_order FROM fields AS f WHERE UserField.field_id = f.id LIMIT 1)'
                )
            )
        )

Having the raw query solved my problem. Hope it helps anybody who comes across a similar problem!