The problem I see with your model is in your ZipLocation you have the code set to a PK.
The Problem: It is often thought that a zipcode belongs to only one city. And that a city can have many zipcodes. There are no such rules in the postal system. One zip code could and often overlaps many city boundaries. Especially in rural areas. So your ZipLocation Table as it is defined could not have records like the following without violating the PK: 84087, Woods Cross, UT 84087, West Bountiful, UT I see this design quite a bit and this is where you will run into trouble. But probably not until you get quite a ways down the path of development and start adding a bunch of data. You should follow the naming scheme for table names and special field names like (id, [fkmodel]_id, name, description, created, modified) this will help tremendously during the baking of your model as cake will pick up all the appropriate hasOne, hasMany, belongsTo, etc. This will also help in your building your forms for creating your dropdowns and autofill text as if your models have a name field it is used in the dropdown. I don't like to see user data stored in the PK. If you need it to maintain uniqueness (which you don't want to in this case) there are other ways to guarantee the user data is unique. PK and FK should be for the data relations, and program use only. I would review section 2.4 of the manual http://book.cakephp.org/view/22/CakePHP-Conventions which talks about all of the file naming, model and database, controller and view conventions. Creating the tables as below allows you to have multiple cities in the same zipcode and still maintain proper relations between the tables. Your Model relations still remain as Location hasOne ZipLocation, State hasMany ZipLocation, ZipLocations belongTo Locations, and ZipLocations belongTo States. And your Form can display the proper autofill selections when the user enters 84087 or any other zips that might have multiple cities. -------------- locations -------------- id (PK) name street1 street 2 zip_location_id (FK) ... -------------- zip_locations -------------- id (PK) zipcode (indexed) city state_id (FK) -------------- states -------------- id (PK) code name Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://cakeqs.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CakePHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cake-php+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
