CakePHP 3 - Contain only second-level association

Question

I am working on a subscription system. Users subscribe to Activities, but Activities have Options (different pricing options). So Users are actually linked to Options, with Subscriptions acting as join table.

Activities hasMany Options and Options hasMany Subscriptions

Now I often want a list of Subscriptions for a specific activity, regardless of options. I found that

$activity = $this->Activities->get($id, ['contain' => 'Options.Subscriptions']);

...works well to get the options which in turn contain the subscriptions. How could go about omitting the Options from the contain, such that only the Subscriptions are found?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 07 '18 at 14:39

You'll have to ditch the idea of using containments for that task, that's not how they work, containments will always include additional data.

If you want to retrieve a models records depending on other records that may be associated with them, then you should query the target model, ie Subscriptions, and look into using the query builders association filtering methods, namely matching() and innerJoinWith().

It should be as simple as:

$query = $this->Activities->Options->Subscriptions
    ->find()
    ->matching('Options.Activities', function (\Cake\ORM\Query $query) use ($id) {
        return $query->where([
            'Activities.id' => $id
        ]);
    });

This will create a query with the required INNER joins for the associations, so that it selects only subscriptions that are associated to an option that is associated to the activity with the given id.

CakePHP 3 - Contain only second-level association

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