Skipping relations table and getting records directly.

Hi, I am not sure I understand the Problem correctly.

I think you should write your own getGroupsItems() method.

doing something like this:

class Group extend Phalcon\Mvc\Model
{
    public fucntion initialize()
    {
         $this->hasMany("id", "GroupsItems", "group_id", array("alias" => "GroupsItemsRelations")));
    }

    public function getGroupsItems()
    { 
         $relations = $this->groupsItemsRelations();

         $items = array();

         foreach($relations as $rela) {
               $items[] = $rela->getItem();
         }
         return $items;
    }
}

Hello Songtao, and thanks for your response.

Yeah, that's almost exactly what I'm doing right now, but if I want to filter the items, I'd have to do something like this:

// For the example, let's assume $arguments looks like this:
// array(
//    "field" => "id",
//     "operator" => ">",
//     "comparisonValue" => 10
// );
// Although I'd like to do SQL / PHQL selections like when using ::find()
public function getItems($arguments) {
    $relations = $this->getGroupsItems();

   $ret = array();
   foreach($relations as $relation) {
        $tmpItem = $relation->getItem();

        switch($arguments["operator"]) {
            case ">":
                if($tmpItem->{$arguments["field"]} > $arguments["comparisonValue"]) {
                    $ret[] = $tmpItem;
                }
                break;

            case "<":
                // Etc...
                break;
        }
   }

   return $ret;
}

As you see, it quickly becomes tedious and bloated... I'd like to do these things directly in the ORM.

If I was unclear, I'll try to improve my description of the problem; I'd like to do exactly what your example does, but I'd like to get the related records without having to loop through them in PHP after having fetched them from the DB:

// Assume $arguments = array(
//   "conditions" => "id > ?0",
//   "bind" => array(0 => "10")
// );
public function getItems($arguments) {
    $relations = $this->getGroupsItems();
    $items = $relations->getItem($arguments); // Returns an array of Item-objects.
    return $items;
}

Do you understand the issue? I have another case where I built a completely custom query to get the fields I want with proper joins etc, which is fast and works well, but I feel there should be functionality for this, since Phalcon has such an impressive interface, and this should be a common problem.

Best regards, dimhoLt

Have you check this:

https://forum.phalcon.io/discussion/545/many-to-many-relation

Seems very much like what I was looking for! Gonna try this out =) Thanks!