You really need to think of the three entities separately first, and decide how they should be related before you go on and start coding. Making an ER diagram is usually very helpful. (look it up if you don't know what an ER diagram is...you'll find a ton of info).
It sounds like your app is like a bulletin board. In that case, off the top of my head, how I'd first flesh it out follows: Categories can have many topics Topics belong to a category Profiles can have many topics (a user can start many topics) Topics belong to many profiles (topics are written to by more than one user) Categories and Profiles don't need a relationship; their relation can be inferred by the other relationships if need be. I guess if you REALLY wanted to know who created a category though, you'd have Categories belong to Profiles and Profiles Have Many Categories, but I won't include that. So you'd have: Categories Have Many Topics Topics Belong To Categories Profiles HABTM Topics And you'd need the tables: categories, topics, profiles, profiles_topics Now, if this was a BB, you'd also have posts. And Posts would belong to Topics (threads) and Topics would have many Posts. That's how I'd do it I guess. If your app is different from that though, then your relationships would possibly be different and you'd have to follow the previous post's advice and ask yourself those questions. I think an ER diagram will help you a lot to figure out what you want before you spend a lot of time coding in the wrong direction. On Jul 21, 10:06 am, ulterior <ulteriordes...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm somewhat new to cake, this is my second app and I'm having > problems with relationships. The first app I created was pretty > straightforward and I had a great time writing it in cake but my > database skills aren't up to par with my php! Here goes: > > I have three tables that contain data which I want to relate, > profiles, categories and topics. I created a categories_topics table > with category_id and topic_id and that's just fine. > > However, I want to link the categories and topics to profiles so I > created categories_topics_profiles which contains the > category_topic_id (from the join table) and the profile_id (to link to > the Profiles model) but it's giving me errors when I try to run a > simple find. > > Is this the right way to build the tables or am I missing something? > Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. > > Thanks, > -Chris --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to cake-php@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cake-php+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
