In CakePHP 2.4, what is the correct syntax to foreach
through my data in order to customize the contents and structure of JSON output from my controller?
I currently have the following method, which creates a .json that directly mirrors Cake's internal array of all my posts:
public function points() {
$this->autoRender = false; // We don't render a view in this example
$this->Post->recursive = -1; //Don't return stuff we don't need
return json_encode($this->Post->find('all'));
}
This creates JSON that looks like this, with each post's data the child of its own Post object (prettified with carriage returns so you can read it):
[{"Post":{"id":"1",
"user_id":"1",
"organism_id":"0",
"title":"Title Text",
"lat":"44.54401744186992",
"lng":"-68.26070404052734",
"body":"Body Text",
"created":"2014-01-19 07:13:29",
"modified":"2014-01-19 07:13:29"}
},
{"Post":{"id":"2",
"user_id":"1",
"organism_id":"0",
"title":"Title Text",
"lat":"44.54401744186992",
"lng":"-68.26070404052734",
"body":"Body Text",
"created":"2014-01-19 07:13:29",
"modified":"2014-01-19 07:13:29"}
}]
This is a problem, because (A) For performance reasons, I might not want to dump all the data for each post into the JSON, and (B) for output to Google Maps, I need to output each post's data as child objects of one Posts object, like so:
{"Posts":[
{"id":"1",
"user_id":"1",
"organism_id":"0",
"title":"Title Text",
"lat":"44.54401744186992",
"lng":"-68.26070404052734",
"body":"Body Text",
"created":"2014-01-19 07:13:29",
"modified":"2014-01-19 07:13:29"
},
{"id":"2",
"user_id":"1",
"organism_id":"0",
"title":"Title Text",
"lat":"44.54401744186992",
"lng":"-68.26070404052734",
"body":"Body Text",
"created":"2014-01-19 07:13:29",
"modified":"2014-01-19 07:13:29"}]}
I know I somehow need to foreach
through the data and build an array. How does this work? foreach ($posts as $post):
doesn't work inside the controller.
I found the solution!
In the controller:
public function points() {
$this->request->onlyAllow('ajax'); //Don't respond to non-AJAX requests
$this->Post->recursive = -1; //don't return info from other controllers
$this->set('posts', $this->Post->find('all'));
}
In /view/posts/json/points.ctp:
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$markers[] = array(
'id' => $post['Post']['id'],
'lat' => $post['Post']['lat'],
'lng' => $post['Post']['lng']
); //make an array of the contents of each post I want to include
}
$data = array(
'Posts' => $markers); //Make everything the child of a 'Posts' object
echo json_encode($data); //Turn it into JSON!
Try this......
$data = array();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$data[] = $post['Posts'];
}
$postdata['Posts'] = $data;
echo json_encode($postdata);
You can also use the Hash
Utility:
$posts = $this->Post->find('all');
$posts = array('Posts' => Hash::extract($posts, '{n}.Post'));
$this->set('posts', posts);