This seems like a fairly common case, but it might not be obvious for everyone. While the title is not totally clear, let’s use an exemple to show where the problem lies.

Let’s say we have a Message model, which has the following fields : id, sender, receiver, created, title, text. We’d like our sender and receiver field to link with our User model, so from and to will contain a user id. If we were to follow CakePHP’s naming convention, we’d have two user_id fields, which is not going to work for obvious reasons. So this is where we have to break CakePHP’s naming convention, which can lead to some confusion. Fear not, the solution is quite simple!

In order for this case to work, all we have to do is change the key in our association :

<?php
class Message extends AppModel {
 
	var $name = 'Message';
	var $belongsTo = array(
		//In most case, this would be User instead of Sender
		'Sender' => array('className' => 'User',
				'foreignKey' => 'sender_id'
 
		),
		//Same goes for Receiver
		'Receiver' => array('className' => 'User',
				'foreignKey' => 'receiver_id'
		),
	);
}
?>

Once the key is changed, data returned from a find on the Message model will be broke down with these keys we just set.