Yep, that's how you do it. I've never used Cake, but Rails does it no
problem. Well, I mean, it's a bit more inconvenient then when the join
table can be completely ignored and invisible, but it works, I've done it.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-has-many-through-association

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 3:02 PM, Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> TL;DR: when you have a database table whose whole job is to contain pairs
> of keys connecting ID's of related tables, what if you want to say more
> about that relationship (e.g. a time-frame in which that relationship
> existed)? I'm particularly working in a Rails-like CakePHP context.
>
> My particular case:
>
> I'm working on a database project with a faculty member who's interested
> in certain women who were associated with particular convents once upon a
> time.
>
> Our prototype database has tables for
>
> Women
> -id
> -name
> -birth
> -death
> -etc
>
> Convents
> -id
> -name
> -location
> -etc
>
> Convents_Women
> -woman_id
> -convent_id
>
> I'm working in CakePHP, which has a Rails-like db structure, and this is
> how it likes to handle relationships.
>
> What I'm wondering is this: if there is other information about a
> relationship other than that it exists (e.g. the dates during which a
> person was at a convent; what their role was during that time, etc), is
> there a preferred / customary way of representing that? I had imagined that
> the convents_women table might look like:
>
> -woman_id
> -convent_id
> -role
> -start_date
> -end_date
>
> But the Cake/Rails scaffolding system doesn't seem to have a way of
> working with that. Or at least I haven't found the magic words to find a
> good explanation.
>
> I could, I imagine, subsequently add table fields to convents_women; but I
> wonder where we'd want to add that information in a generic application
> scaffold, or would I have to build some cockamamie extra view?
>
> I'd welcome any thoughts on the matter. I'd also be delighted to hear from
> other folks who are using CakePHP. I'm very new to it.
>
> Thanks
> Ken
>