Comments on: Finding Random Model Records in CakePHP 1.2

By: mark

mark — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:41:07 +0000

by the way:
caching the primary keys might actually make your method 100x faster…
usually those records dont change that often. and new ones dont have to appear right away.
maybe by enabling “cache”=>true/false as parameter?

By: mark

mark — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:37:25 +0000

nice idea
but i ended up with using sql internal RAND() because its way faster – especially if the records are getting more and more…

function __findRandom($options) {
$type = ‘first’;
if (isset($options['type']) && $options['type'] != ‘random’) {
$type = $options['type'];
unset($options['type']);
}
$options['order'] = ‘rand()’;
return $this->find($type, $options);
}

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:28:40 +0000

Thanks Selino – looks like I forgot the closing brace for the class. Also, you’ll need to have support for custom find methods, which I should’ve included in the code. I’ve updated the code on Github to fix both issues.

By: Selino

Selino — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:56:48 +0000

Warning (512): SQL Error: 1054: Unknown column ‘random’ in ‘where clause’

This is what I get when I execute : $this->set(‘tip’, $this->Tip->find(‘random’));

It looks like it’s not seeing ‘random’ as an option but as a field.

I also had to add a } to the function. When I do a balance braces on the githup code it shows that the parent function definition is not closed.