Dynamic Relations To Model

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

Hello,

first of all, I would like to mention that I am very new to Yii.

From what I understand, in modelling the database with foreign keys I get some relations:


public function relations()

    {

        return array(

            'posts'=>array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Post', 'author_id'),

            'profile'=>array(self::HAS_ONE, 'Profile', 'owner_id'),

        );

    }

I would like to model these relations on the fly. Is that possible? Let’s say I have a table ServiceProvider and this table can be related either to a Person table or a Company table. I would not want to make foreign keys for every type of Service Provider that I can have so I create a “type” column that tells me what type that service provider is. Can I change my relation depending on that type attribute? Something like:


public function relations()

    {

        if ($this->type==1) return array(

            'posts'=>array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Post', 'author_id'),

            'profile'=>array(self::HAS_ONE, 'Profile', 'owner_id'),

        );

         else //return different relations

    }

What I would want to achieve is a uniform process to work with service providers no matter the type. If the solution above does not work, could you suggest another one?

Thank you very much for your time!

2

You would want to to put the additional condition for the relation in the ‘on’ clause:




public function relations()

{

    return array(

        'posts'=>array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Post', 'author_id', 'on'=>'t.type = 1'),

        'profile'=>array(self::HAS_ONE, 'Profile', 'owner_id', 'on'=>'t.type = 1'),

        'tickets'=>array(self::HAS_MANY, 'Tickets', 'author_id', 'on'=>'t.type = 2'),

        'providerProfile'=>array(self::HAS_ONE, 'Provider', 'owner_id', 'on'=>'t.type = 2'),

    );

}
3

Thanks!