Pagination of Multiple Models in CakePHP 1.2.5

I'm working on a view for a blog that mixes blog posts, comments, and uploaded media items into one large grid layout. I've set开发者_C百科 up the individual models in CakePHP and the associations, some of which are as follows:

Comment BelongsTo Post or Media
Post HasMany Media

What I'm working with is trying to sort all three models (Comment, Media, Post) into one large array of data which I can then paginate.

I've got a 'created' datetime field in the database already. I understand how to paginate each of the individual database calls using the CakePHP PaginationHelper. I also have merged the arrays. However, mixing individual database calls and then merging the arrays seems to break the pagination as it doesn't work with the PaginationHelper (as I understand).

Do you have any suggestions for doing this?

Also, I'd like to keep the number of database calls down, so any suggestions along those lines would be great. Thanks!

~Andrew

It sounds like you want to utilize some sort of UNION select regarding those 3 models. You can achieve this by overriding the model's default paginate and paginateCount methods. The basics are covered in the Cook Book (http://book.cakephp.org/view/249/Custom-Query-Pagination).

It sounds like you'll want to replace the find(all) with find('query') like so:

/**
 * Overridden paginate method - group by week, away_team_id and home_team_id
 */
function paginate($conditions, $fields, $order, $limit, $page = 1, $recursive = null, $extra = array()) {
    $recursive = -1;
    $group = $fields = array('week', 'away_team_id', 'home_team_id');
    return $this->query('SELECT field1, field2 FROM table1 
                         UNION SELECT field1, field2 FROM table2 
                         LIMIT '.(($page-1)*$limit).', '.$limit);
}