Planet CakePHP

A new feature of CakePHP 1.3 is to create VirtualFields. Why do you care? Typically Cake can use the $displayField variable of a model for drop down lists in your views. Suppose a User model contains two columns, firstname and lastname. There is no way to concatenate this with the $displayField variable. You can however, use $virtualFields to create a new variable that can be assigned to $displayField.

My example uses an Employee model.

class Employee extends AppModel {
	var $name = 'Employee';
        var $virtualFields = array('full_name' => 'CONCAT(Employee.firstname, " ", Employee.lastname)');
        var $displayField = 'full_name';
}