CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cakephp
user1542639
user1542639

Reputation: 597

Cakephp workaround for model inheritance relationship

From my understanding, cakephp doesn't support database inheritance relationship. However, I want to create a database with different type of Users.

In this case, there are three types of Users: Seller, Customer, and Administrator. Every users should have basic User information such as password, username, etc.
However, each types of users will have its own unique set of datas. For example, seller may have inventory_id while customer may have something like delivery_address, etc.

I have been thinking of creating a workaround to this problem without destroying cakephp convention. I was going to create three additional foreign keys, admin_id, seller_id and customer_id, inside User table, which links to other table. However, knowing that this is an IS-A relationship not HAS-A, I would have to make sure that two of the ids are NULL value. Therefore, this workaround seems ugly to me..

Is there any other simpler, better approach?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 1040

Answers (2)

erobwen
erobwen

Reputation: 71

I have been thinking about this problem for some time now, and I have eventually got around to build a solution for it. What I came up with is a new ORM that can be used on top of CakePHP.

It sort of works as CakePHP 3.0 with entities that represent an id/model, but it is much more advanced and supports multi table inheritance and single table inheritance.

Check it out: https://github.com/erobwen/Cream

Upvotes: 1

Happy
Happy

Reputation: 826

For this type of database structure I would probably look at adopting an Entity-Attribute-Value model. This would mean your customer may have a delivery_address and your user may have an inventory_id but as far as your relationship in Cake is concerned your both your user and customer would just have an attribute_id ... you can then create another table that stores what type of attributes are available.

It it's simplest form, your user and customer would be attached to an *attribute_lookup* or *attribute_link* table by a hasMany (probably) relationship. That attribute_lookup/link table would be connected by a belongsTo/hasOne relationship to the actual Attribute Type and Attribute Value models.

Providing that you normalise your tables correctly, you can stick well within Cake relationship conventions.

You can read more about EAV here.

Upvotes: 1

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