Models, foreign keys and table associations - whats best practise in codeigniter?

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]

I presume is to stitch the data together from the model into a array that is nicely useable in the view?

Exactly. This is what the automated ORM libraries do based on a set of conventions you must follow. There's no difference in the implementation behind it: Iterate over the result, group rows by their primary keys.

Also, this should be done in the model. Controllers shouldn't be bothered with modeling the data.