How to sort data of bind table in cakephp 2.0

Question

I need the data from various table. I bind them by using cakephp's $hasMany variable. The data is fetched successfully. But I need to sort the result coming from $hasMany table.

for eg. I have two tables

• Survey
• Questions

Now Survey table contains the data related to Survey like title, id, purpose and Questions table contains question for related survey. I bind questions table with survey in survey model. Now I have a field in Questions table with name ordering. I need to fetch data in that order.

How can I fetch it in that way?

Please help me.

Answer 1

If you want to sort the data directly when it is fetched from db

You can define default order when adding relations between tables in your models. In your Survey model:

var $hasMany = array(
    'Question' => array(
        'order' => 'ordering DESC'
    )
);

See http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/models/associations-linking-models-together.html#hasmany.

You can also define custom ordering when retrieving data from your controller in your conditional array, http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/models/retrieving-your-data.html#find:

$conditions = array(
    'order' => array('Question.ordering DESC')
);

If you are paginating your result with the paginator component, you can setup it like in following example book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/components/pagination.html#query-setup:

public $paginate = array(
    'order' => array(
       'Question.ordering' => 'desc'
    )
);

If you want to sort the data presented in the view

Here you can use the pagination helper (together with the pagination component in the controller) as:

echo $this->Paginator->sort('Question.ordering');

see book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/helpers/paginator.html#creating-sort-links

Sorry for removing 'http://' on the two last links, but I am not allowed to post more than two links (<10 rep).