Building conditional statement across multiple models (CakePHP 1.2.5)

Let's say I have 3 models: User, Region, Country.

User belongsTo Region
Region belongsTo Country

Each of these models is using the Containable behavior. I'm attempting to find users from the country with code 'US'. Here's what I'm attempting:

$users = $this->User->find('all', array(
    'conditions' => array('Country.code' => 'US'),
    'contain'    => array('Region.Country'),
));

CakePHP is separating this into 2 queries:

1. First, it is SELECTing the ID's for all countries with code 'US'.
2. Then it is using those ID's to SELECT all users JOINing regions where region.country_id is in that list of country ID's previously retrieved.

As a result, I end up with SQL errors in my app since my conditions array contains a reference to Country.code, and the second query that Cake builds doesn't JOIN countries.

The best Cake solution I see is to build a sub-query as described in the Complex Find Conditions portion of the manual. However, this seems very convoluted, and is more of a hack than I 开发者_运维百科would like to implement. Is there an easier way that I'm overlooking?

Nate Abele (former lead dev of CakePHP) wrote an article about doing ad hoc joins which might help.

Put the conditions in the contain as well. E.g:

$users = $this->User->find('all', array('contain' => array(
    'Region' => array(
        'Country' => array(
            'conditions' => array('Country.code' => 'US'),
        ),
    ),
)));

See the second-to-last example in the Containable manual