Form for deep association with CakePHP, almost working - forms

Question

I'm writing my first Cake app and trying to set up my first deep association. It's very nearly working but I have a couple of small issues.
The first part of my app is a customer database. A customer has many addresses, and an address has many contacts. The data structure returned contains duplicated data from the address model.
Here's the 3 models:
class Customer extends AppModel {
public $hasMany = 'CustomerAddress';
}
class CustomerAddress extends AppModel {
public $belongsTo = 'Customer';
public $hasMany = 'CustomerContact';
}
class CustomerContact extends AppModel {
public $belongsTo = 'CustomerAddress';
}
In my customer controller, I want to get associated addresses and their contacts. I can do this by setting recursion on the find command:
CustomerController.php
public function find( $id = NULL) {
$this->set('customers', $this->Customer->find('all', array( 'recursive' => 2)));
}
And this works brilliantly, with one caveat. The data structure returned looks like this:
array(
'Customer' => array(
'id' => '46',
....
),
'CustomerAddress' => array(
(int) 0 => array(
'id' => '35',
'customer_id' => '46',
.....
'Customer' => array(
'id' => '46',
.....
),
'CustomerContact' => array(
(int) 0 => array(
'id' => '29',
'customer_address_id' => '35',
.....
)
)
)
)
)
At a glance, this looks fine, and for all intents and purposes works as the data is formatted how you'd expect. But, CustomerAddress also contains a Customer object, which is a duplicate of the top level Customer object. I assume this is because recursion is working with the belongsTo on the address model.
I've tried setting the recursion to 1, but then I only get the address not the contact. I've tried setting the recursion in the address model, but that doesn't seem to effect the find at the Customer level.
It's not a huge issue, just worried about future performance issues and unnecessary calls to the database.

Answer 1

This is one of the reasons why it is discouraged to use the recursive setting. Most turn off recursion (set it to -1) then use the Containable behavior to get associated models instead. Make sure in AppModel, there is the line
public $actsAs = array('Containable');
Then, to get your data:
$this->Customer->find('all', array('contain' => array('CustomerAddress' => array('CustomerContact'))));