no_cake_associations.md

Associations for non-CakePHP apps

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 not built with CakePHP), 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 here.

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 Faker\Generator;

class CityFactory extends BaseFactory
{
    protected function initialize(): void
    {
        $this->getTable()
            ->belongsTo('Country')
            ->hasMany('Addresses');
    }
    
    protected function getRootTableRegistryName(): string
    {
        return "Cities";
    }   
    
    protected function setDefaultTemplate(): void
    {
        $this->setDefaultData(function (Generator $faker) {
            return [
                'name' => $faker->city(),
            ];
        })
        ->withCountry();
    }
}

Once this is defined, you may then call:

$city = CityFactory::make()
    ->with('Addresses', 4)
    ->with('Country', ['name' => 'India'])
    ->getEntity();

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

You will find described in the cookbook HERE how to define your associations. Non CakePHP applications will not need to create any table objects, but rather use the getTable() public method.