I had been struggling with some weirdness that CakePHP has been displaying while trying to add some new features to the baseball league website, where Cake + PHP 4.4 + Postgres were deciding to just be sulky and not work together well.

So, I was trying to figure out how to make a test for this so I could file a bug (CakePHP not finding the proper name of the Postgres sequence for a table) when I tracked down nate on IM to whine to him about this problem, he started bugging me about "not paying attention" when looking around in code to try and track down what I thought was a bug. If I had looked at the API a little closer I would've been steered towards the solution he gave me.

Lucky for me, it turns out that the solution (for now) to the problem was to simply add the name of the sequence for that table as a variable to the model definition. ~~~ array('className' => 'BallotItem', 'foreignKey' => 'ballot_item_id', 'conditions' => '', 'fields' => '', 'order' => '' ), 'Franchise' => array('className' => 'Franchise', 'foreignKey' => 'franchise_id', 'conditions' => '', 'fields' => '', 'order' => '' ) ); var $validate = array('ballot_item_id' => array('rule' => 'numeric', 'required' => true), 'franchise_id' => array('rule' => 'numeric', 'required' => true), 'answer' => array('rule' => 'numeric', 'required' => true, 'message' => 'You must vote on this item') ); } ?> ~~~

This confirmed to me that my new-found respect for trying to come up with the simplest solution to a problem is the correct way to do so. Since my head is full of all sorts of nonsense (work items, family life, baseball stats, old Dungeons & Dragons adventures from my teenage years) I find that at times I am better served by taking the time to think about the problem rather than start digging around. Especially when it comes to code that was well-written an has been tested by lots of people, like the overwhelming majority of CakePHP's core code.

Thanks again to nate for proving to me that the Devil's in the details. And continuing to make me feel stupid.