Return ACL group of user

I have created a user authentication system u开发者_运维技巧sing cakephp's aco/aro tables using this tutorial.

I am now creating an interface to change the groups of users and display the current group of the user.

I searched the API and could not find a built-in method to query the group that a user belongs to. What is the best way to do this?

You may or may not decide to do this but in my users table I have a security_group_id field that points to a security_groups table. Within this security_groups table I store the aliases/names of the security groups (i.e. Administrators, Site Users, Managers, etc.).

In the aro table these security groups are root/parent nodes for all the subsequent user accounts that I create on the system. Thus by querying my users tables security_group_id field, I can determine the group that the user is in.

Another approach would be to do:

$aro =& ClassRegistry::init('Aro');
$theUser = array('User' => array('id' => <user_id>));
$aroPath = $aro->node($theUser);

$aroPath will be an array including the user node in the $aro table as well as any and all parent nodes.