yii db relationships with custom column names

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

I am bit confused about the yii db relationships. Here is snippet of my db schema:

master table 1:

campaigns (id, CID, campaign_name) -> model name is: Campaigns, CID is unique

master table 2:

affiliates (id, affid, affiliate_name, default_pixel) -> model name is: Affiliates, affid is unique

join table of above two master tables, need many-to-many relation:

campaigns_affiliates(CID, affid, tracking_pixel) -> model name is: CampaignsAffiliates

From above schema I need help with two things:

  1. Suggest the relation that should be defined at each Model level

  2. MVC structure suggestion for Join table, since join table has extra column of tracking_pixel to override default_pixel defined in affiliates table, should it have its own different controller or should be handled by either AffiliatesController or CampaignsController

2

Any suggestions?

3

As far as the relations, have you read and understood Relational Active Record?

There are countless posts about how to work with Many-to-Many relationships in different ways around here. Personally I utilize the giix extension from mentel. If you haven’t already I would recommend taking a look at that.

4

I am fine with the general buid of AR relations but its pretty general and obviously doesnt cover the complex scenarios. Also tried to search a lot but didnt get much help from other threads or blogs.

Wasn’t aware of giix, thanks for sharing it. I will try it and drop in my experience with it.

5

There is an example in there that looks like it will cover what you want.

6

Well somehow i managed to address the issue by violating lots of MVC and AR rules.

However my questions still stands, in rails we have provision to specify :primary_key parameter in relationship defintion, yii doesnt have any such facility?

In the table definition that I used:

campaigns (id, CID, campaign_name) -> model name is: Campaigns, CID is unique and id as primary key.

campaigns_affiliates(CID, affid, tracking_pixel) -> model name as CampaignsAffiliates

each CampaignsAffiliates object BELONGS_TO Campaigns and I wanted to access the relationship as:

$campaign = CampaignsAffiliates::model()->findByAttributes(array("CID"=>"23"))->campaign

so that it would allow me to use $campaign->campaign_name directly.

But seems there is now way in YII to set this kind of relationship where primary key is not "id". Field CID from campaigns_affilaites was pointing to "id" of campaigns which was wrong in my case.

I am not sure if I used it correctly or did not find a way to address this problem. If someone knows how to address it would really appriciate if you can write down the exact relation code that I should had used in the Model Classes of both tables.