Hello!

I'm having a hard time understanding has_many and the scaffold. I've got an Album that contains many Tracks (var $has_many = 'tracks') and a track belongs to an album. However, in a scaffold generated edit action a $this->album magically appears from nowhere. I cannot see anywhere where it gets instantiated. And from what i can read, i need to add array('include' => 'track') but as there are no $this->album = $Album->find(id)... so there is not anywhere i can add the array() argument.

How do i load the $this->album->tracks field? The edit-action does not generate an inner join. What do i need to do to fill the tracks field?
Also, where does $this->album instantiated?

Regards.

Arthur,

$this->album->track->load();

will load tracks on

$this->album->tracks

AkActionController::instantitiateModelClass instantiates models in controllers and makes them available under $this->.

If params['id'] is available, it will load the model named after the controller using that id.

Until now, it was not possible to define the options for the automatic finder in a simple way. I've just added the ability to define which options should be passed to the finder method by using the finder_options attribute like

class AlbumController extends ApplicationController{
    var $finder_options = array('Album' => array('include' => 'tracks')); // Album case matters
    // ....
}

Note: this only works on the trunk version.

Imagine you have a User model which is related to posts, videos, images, addresses, credit cards, invoices and so on. That is a common scenario and it is unlikely you want to instantiate all the associated models every time you load a user.