cakephp paginate model with multiple association

I have three tables : Units, Offers and Agents with following associations

• Unit hasMany Offers
• Offer belongsTo Agent

When I paginate Unit table I get all the units and all the corresponding Offers for each unit , but not the Agent that offer belongs to. Ex:

- Unit1
  - offer1
  - offer开发者_StackOverflow中文版2
- Unit2
  - offer1
  - offer2
  - offer3

And I want to have something like this:

- Unit1
  - offer1
    - agent1
  - offer2
    - agent2
- Unit2
  - offer1
    - agent1
  - offer2
    - agent2
  - offer3
    - agent3

How to do it?

The easiest solution is to increase the recursive of the Model before calling the paginage.

$this->Unit->recursive = 1; //or more

But you should be very careful, because you could call the same Model twice. Extra advice here: Try to unbind Unnecessary models before using this. Again - be very careful, because this could slowdown the app.

Using the Containable behaviour should get you there. I never use recursive now.

Alternatively, it can sometimes be helpful to create a database view across the tables of interest. This will make paging a lot simpler and will allow you to specify exactly what data you require (avoiding unnecessary data transfer).