PHP active record: use conditions to select assosiative data

Question

I use PHPActiveRecord. Assume I've a table Manager and a table Employees. A Manager has multiple Employees and an Employee has one Manager.

I've defined this association:

• model Manager: static $has_many = { array('employee')}
• model Employee: static $belongs_to = { array('manager')}

$manager->employee gives me an array with Employee instances.

How do I select the oldest Employee? Or the name of the last Employee. How can I use conditions in a associative data? I can extend the association like below:

• model Manager: static $has_many = { array('employee', 'order' => 'age desc', 'limit => 1')}

or

• model Manager: static $has_many = { array('employee', 'order' => 'id desc', 'limit => 1')}

But with this solution I've to create a new association for every new case.

Does a better solution exists? Something like below?

• $manager->employee->last()->name to select the name of the last employee

• $manager->employee->find('limit => 1, 'order' => 'age desc') to select the last employee

Answer 1

This is a bit old of a question, but I feel it at least requires an answer.

You can define multiple relations that you want for the same class. I'm not sure if you explicitly want to avoid that, and sans modifying the framework to have $manager->employee-> return some sort of object you're out of luck.

public static $has_one = array(
    array('last_employee', 'class_name'=>'Employee',/** conditions **/ 'foreign_key'=>'manager_id'),
    array('oldest_employee', 'class_name'=>'Employee',/** conditions **/ 'foreign_key'=>'manager_id'),
);

You can then call $manager->last_employee; or $manager->oldest_employee. I feel like even something like scopes doesn't exactly give what you want, so this seems like a good solution.