Hi Sun Moon,
Do you have already established the proper relations among those models?
I guess they should be like the following:
Sourse HAS_MANY ChildrenOfSource / ChildrenOfSource BELONGS_TO Source ... 1:N
Source MANY_MANY Target / Target MANY_MANY Source ... N:N
Or you may have divided the MANY_MANY relation into 2 sets of 1:N relations. This is also fine:
Source HAS_MANY SourceTargetMap / SourceTargetMap BELONGS_TO Source ... 1:N
Target HAS_MANY SourceTargetMap / SourceTargetMap BELONGS_TO Target ... 1:N
Filtering by a BELONGS_TO relation is quite easy.
You can find the standard solution for it in the following wiki:
http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/281/searching-and-sorting-by-related-model-in-cgridview
I hope you have already got it.
And you may note that the filtering by an indirectly related model is also supported.
Say, you have another model named ‘Foo’, and Foo and Source has a following relation:
Foo HAS_MANY Source / Source BELONGS_TO Foo ... 1:N
Then you can access an attribute of Foo by a notation of $childrenOfSource->source->foo->some_field.
And it also means that you can write like the following in the search() function of ChildrenOfSource:
$criteria = new CDbCriteria;
$criteria->with = array( 'source', 'source.foo' );
...
$criteria->compare( 'foo.some_field', $this->someWord, true );
...
Now, as you have described, your Target can be accessed from ChidrenOfSource by a notation of $chidrenOfSource->source->sourceTargetMap->target. So you can write like this:
$criteria = new CDbCriteria;
$criteria->with = array( 'source', 'source.sourceTargetMaps', 'source.sourceTargetMaps.target',);
$criteria->together = true; // important
...
$criteria->compare( 'target.some_field', $this->someWord, true );
...
Looks easy? Yes it is, kind of.
You will encounter a strange problem when the relations involve a HAS_MANY or MANY_MANY relation … you will not get the proper count of records in the search result.
Please refer to the following wiki for details:
http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/428/drills-search-by-a-has_many-relation
