I have three tables: I have an employee table that has fields like: id (PK), full_name, etc. I have a table of projects, with fields like: id (PK), project_name. I have a third table that will be a combination of the two with foreign keys: id (PK), employee_id (FK), project_id (FK). This seemed the best way to do a Many:Many relationship, so to notate an employee is working on a project, we make a record in this third table keyed to the other two.
So now I’m making my form work to enter or edit an employee and mark what projects they’re working on. I autogenerated (gii) the form for the employee controller/view so just that works great to create/edit and save an employee. I then modified my view to include checkboxes reading from my project table
So this works pretty well to display the names of the projects, but I’m kinda stuck on how to actually work with it. I think “$model” is wrong in this context because that’s the employee model since I’m in the _form table for that view.
My question is how to properly set this up especially when it comes to the actionUpdate() in my employee controller, since I have to get whatever rows exist in my third table and pass those to the checkboxes so they’re properly checked.
It was quite a revelation to me to learn I didn’t need a controller for every model. Here is what I do in my project.
I have a similar situation with templates and criteria (many_many relationship). So I have a template controller and a criteria controller, along with models for template, criteria, and templateCriteria.
The template controller and view displays all the options in the criteria table. I use a multiselect widget instead of checkboxes but its the same idea from the controller perspective.
Some code:
public function actionCreate()
{
$model=new Template;
if(isset($_POST['Template']))
{
$model->attributes=$_POST['Template'];
if($model->save()) {
if(isset($_POST['Template']['criterias'])) {
foreach ($_POST['Template']['criterias'] as $criteri) {
//Foreach criteria posted to template, load TemplateCriteria model
//and assign templateId and criteriaId, save it.
$TemplateCriteria = new TemplateCriteria;
$TemplateCriteria->templateId = $model->id;
$TemplateCriteria->criteriaId = $criteri;
$TemplateCriteria->save();
}
}
//Set create flash message and send user to manage templates page
Yii::app()->user->setFlash('success', "Template '$model->templateName' created successfully.");
$this->redirect(array('index'));
}
}
$this->render('create',array(
'model'=>$model,
));
}
There are a few extensions for saving many-many related records. You’ll notice I am not using them in this example. It was really important to understand how to work with related data with Yii - so learn that first and then install an extension for convenience later.
