CakePHP: How do I load associated data from inside an entity class?

Question

Let's say I have a AuthorsTable with a defined "belongs to many" association with the Articles table defined like so:

// In the initialize function of the AuthorsTable class.
$this->belongsToMany('Articles',
    ['joinTable' => 'authors_articles']
);

(I don't think that the nature of the join is relevant to the question, but just in the interest of giving full context.)

And now, a I have an $author entity that was passed to my function that does not have the associated data loaded with it (ie, it was created using something like $author = $authorsTable->get(19); , so it only has the information in the authors table, not from the articles table.

Is there some kind of entity function in which I can load the associated data, ie, the articles data after the entity has already been created?

Answer 1

It's a little bit over and I do not know if it's still important to you, but maybe for everyone else. You can either use the model's loadInto ( https://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/orm/retrieving-data-and-resultsets.html#loading-additional-associations ) or you can just use the Lazy Loading Plugin, mentioned in the docs ( https://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/orm/entities.html#lazy-loading-associations )

You can find the plugin here: https://github.com/jeremyharris/cakephp-lazyload

The plugin works with both methods! If you prefer Eager Loading , you can use contain (normaly faster). Otherwise, the associations will be loaded "on demand" (saving memory).

Personally, I prefer Eager Loading but use the Lazy Loading Plugin if another member of the team (out of ignorance) forgot to load the Associations.

Answer 2

chriss's answer suggests using loadInto for this. For CakePHP 3, the PHP you need within any Author Entity method is:

TableRegistry::get($this->source())->loadInto($this, ['Articles']);

The same code from within an AuthorsTable method:

$this->loadInto($author, ['Articles']);