LinkedEntities allows the ability to associate your User Entities with any other Entities ( including self referencing ) by a category type. It adds shortcut functions to your User Table for ease of use.

• Ability to define User-to-Entity relationship via a polymorphic table
• Define relationship by category
• Automatic relationship of Entity-to-User
• Shortcut methods based on relationship name

$this->Users->addStarredProject($user, $project);
$this->Users->removeFollowedUser($user, $otherUser);

• CakePHP 3.x
• PHP >=5.6

You can install this plugin into your CakePHP application using composer.

The recommended way to install composer packages is:

composer require angelxmoreno/cakephp-linked-entities

Next you need to load the plugin by adding the following to your config/bootstrap.php file:

// config/bootstrap.php
Plugin::load('LinkedEntities', ['bootstrap' => true]);

Finally, create the required tables using cakephp/migrations:

bin/cake migrations migrate -p LinkedEntities

Or import the sql schema found in config/schema.

1. In your config/app.php define a new config key called LinkedEntities ( see configuration )
2. In your UsersTable add the LinkedEntities.LinkableEntityUser behavior like so:

$this->addBehavior('LinkedEntities.LinkableEntityUser');

3. Optionally add the LinkedEntities.LinkableEntity behavior to the corresponding Table classes defined in your config. i.e:

$this->addBehavior('LinkedEntities.LinkableEntity');

Sample configuration:

// config/app.php
'LinkedEntities' => [
    'UserModel' => 'Users',
    'link_types' => [
        'star' => 1,
        'follow' => 2,
    ],
    'links' => [
        'StarredProjects' => [
            'name' => 'UserStars',
            'className' => 'Projects',
            'linkType' => 1
        ],
        'FollowedProjects' => [
            'name' => 'Followers',
            'className' => 'Projects',
            'linkType' => 2
        ],
        'FollowedUsers' => [
            'name' => 'Followers',
            'className' => 'Users',
            'linkType' => 2
        ]
    ]
]

With the configuration above ( after adding the behavior ) you will have 6 new methods available to your UsersTable:

1. $this->Users->addStarredProjects($user, $project);
2. $this->Users->removeStarredProjects($user, $project);
3. $this->Users->addFollowedProjects($user, $project);
4. $this->Users->removeFollowedProjects($user, $project);
5. $this->Users->addFollowedUsers($user, $otherUser);
6. $this->Users->removeFollowedUsers($user, otherUser);

A string defining the plugin.name of your UsersTable ( defaults to Users )

An array as a int => string ( this saves the int provided under the table column type )

An array as relationship name => settings Settings have the following keys

• name: The name of the relationship from the perspective of the linked entity ( the reverse relationship name )
• className: The name of the table to associate the user to
• linkType: the int value corresponding to one of the defined link_types

If you have a problem with the plugin please open an issue on GitHub.

This plugin is offered under an MIT license.