Associations for standalone cakephp/orm

This page applies when you use this plugin with cakephp/orm as a standalone library — outside the full CakePHP application stack. It is not a Laravel or Symfony adapter; see Setup → Using a different PHP framework? for the recommended factory libraries in those ecosystems.

Associations can be defined within the factories in the initialize() method. The getTable() method provides public access to the model class used by the factories. If not defined in your application (which is probably the case if you're not using the full CakePHP framework), the model class is generated automatically, based on the table name returned by the getRootTableRegistryName method.

For example, considering the following schema:

addresses	cities	countries
id	id	id
street	name	name
city_id	country_id	created
created	created	modified
modified	modified

First create the CityFactory, AddressFactory and CountryFactory classes as described in Fixture Factories.

In the CityFactory, you may then associate the cities belonging to a country and having many addresses in the initialize method:

use CakephpFixtureFactories\Factory\BaseFactory;
use CakephpFixtureFactories\Generator\GeneratorInterface;

class CityFactory extends BaseFactory
{
    protected function initialize(): void
    {
        $this->getTable()
            ->belongsTo('Country')
            ->hasMany('Addresses');
    }

    protected function getRootTableRegistryName(): string
    {
        return 'Cities';
    }

    public function definition(GeneratorInterface $generator): array
    {
        return [
            'name' => $generator->city(),
        ];
    }
}

Once this is defined, you may then call:

$city = CityFactory::new()
    ->with('Addresses', 4)
    ->for(CountryFactory::new(['name' => 'India']))
    ->build();

which will set the city's country, and provide 4 random addresses.

The CakePHP cookbook chapter on associations describes how to define your associations. Non-CakePHP applications don't need to create any table objects — use the getTable() public method instead.