09 Aug 2009 2 Comments

Pagination & Containable

Some people seem to have issues with using the Containable (CakePHP 1.2 – built-in) behavior and pagination. A very simple way of getting around this is just to set the last argument to false when setting the model relations via the $this->{ModelName}->contain(); method.

This example will not work:

$this->Post->recursive = -1;
//include approved comments
$this->Post->contain(
  array(
    'Comment' => array(
      'conditions' => array(
        'Comment.approved' => true
      )
    )
  )
);
$this->paginate();

The reason the above code will not work is not because the recursive level is set to -1, but because the paginate() function makes 2 calls (count records + retrieve records) and after the first call the model relations get reset. Simply adding a false to the end of the contain() function call, will cause the model relationships to not be reset and hence data will be returned as per your request.

e.g.

$this->Post->recursive = -1;
//include approved comments
$this->Post->contain(
  array(
    'Comment' => array(
      'conditions' => array(
        'Comment.approved' => true
      )
    )
  ),
  false
);
$this->paginate();

Don’t forget to reset the model bings after the call if you want to retrieve more information.

$this->Post->resetBindings();

It’s as simple as that.

by devmatt in CakePHP Tags: CakePHP, pagination