How can I use a wildcard search to get a list from scaffolding in a CakePHP?

Question

I\'ve got a scaffold built for CakePHP, but need to have a way for users to type in part of a surname into a text box, click a button and for the list of people to be filtered t

Answer 1

You need to look at the findby methods that CakePHP provides.

in addition to your standard findAll() you have a number of "magic" findby methods which allow you to specify a column in the table to search by:

$this->User->findBySurname($surname);

You also have findBySql(statement) which allows to you use a custom SQL statement. You could use this to execute a LIKE statement as follows:

$users = $this->User->findBySql("SELECT * FROM USERS u WHERE u.SURNAME LIKE '%" . $surname . "%' ORDERBY SURNAME");

That will return you a list of matching users which you can then display to the user. It's not the most efficient query, but it works.