Thanks, cakebaker

Well, its possible for such NamedFinder behavior in CakePHP, i may even check it out when i have time..

However, i think the killer feature in rails one is the way ActiveRecord maintained scope can pass over..
ie, 3 named scope finder chained.
Product.recent.cheap.downloadable
The video on railscast talks about the named_scope thingy..

Anyway, Its very cool dho … such a easy way to declare finder now..

may be one day, it’s possible to port ActiveRecord::base.with_scope over to cake

@Abhimanyu: Thanks, I’m glad it is useful for you!

@Brandon: I agree with you that you have to be careful with using such concepts. And as you can see from the article, I’m not fully convinced it’s a good idea to use the behavior I wrote ;-)

The scenario for which I think it could be useful is when you have conditions you want to use in different combinations. But even then you could encapsulate those conditions in private methods and merge them when they are used.

So, in general it is probably better NOT to use this behavior ;-)

I suggested writing an actual function. I think it’s bad to have this long “config” style implementation to hide functionality:

function findPending()
{
return $this->find(‘all’, array(‘conditions’ => array(‘User.is_pending’ => ‘1′)));
}

What’s so bad about that? :) It takes LESS time to write (you don’t have to include the behavior). Plus, this way the function is listed in any API and can be indexed by your IDE for quick variable reference. Otherwise, there is no way to know that such a function exists. And believe me, if you have a large project you will forget the function is there if it’s not concretely defined.

$this->User->findPending(); is much better than those of magic constant statements like these:
$this->User->findAll(array(‘User.status’=>0));

Basically this is your toolset, its upto you how you use it. You can make things simpler and complex at both times.

IMO, this concept just adds another layer of code that needs to be maintained and executed at runtime to essentially “mimic” a hardcoded function. It’s like you are trying to abstract code that’s already abstract. :)

It would take you LESS time to simply define a function and return a $this->find() statement. Maintaining code that is mixed with hardcoded methods and these “magic” ones would be a nightmare!

I think a quick pro/con list of using this behavior would help programmers make a more educated decision whether or not to include this type of behavior.