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Skem · 10-14-2021, 01:42 AM

Greetings people,

I'm new to Code Igniter 4 ans after browsing your documentation, I have a question that hasn't found its answer yet. I would like to know what is the proper way to deal with foreign keys when we are working with entities.

Let's take an example: I have a table for books, and a table for authors. Obviously, the books table will have a foreign key toward the author table.
If I ask my model to perform a $bookModel->find(1) I will get the book id #1 from the table, and the ->getAuthor() method will get me an ID, like let's say 9

Now, I don't much care about this ID. What I really want is the name of the author, which is set in the "name" column of the author table.
How do you properly get that? Do I really have to send another query, like "authorModel->find(9)" ? that would be very very heavy in the end, in term of sql queries amount....
Or is there another way more classy option?

note: I know there are ORMs working with CI4 which would solve this problem. But due to the structure of the database I currently have to work with, none of them would work (I am using mysql, and all the data are split between multiple bases - as in sql "CREATE DATABASE"- , with tons of relationship between them. While all ORMs I have found requires to connect specifically to only one of them)