How to create plugin pivot table entries?

Question

I have a record for an entity my plugin needs and that may be related to many Entries, so I have a pivot table, much like Craft's usergroups_user table.

I'm creating and updating my table fine and I'm not looking at my pivot table. I notice the the user group approach is to delete any entries before creating new ones:

public function assignUserToGroups($userId, $groupIds = null)
{
    craft()->db->createCommand()
        ->delete('usergroups_users', array('userId' => $userId));

    if ($groupIds)
    {
        if (!is_array($groupIds))
        {
            $groupIds = array($groupIds);
        }

        foreach ($groupIds as $groupId)
        {
            $values[] = array($groupId, $userId);
        }

        craft()->db->createCommand()->insertAll('usergroups_users', array('groupId', 'userId'), $values);
    }

    return true;
}

I take it this is the best way to handle pivot tables and there is no 'sync' functionality similar to that found on Laravel's Eloquent class http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent-relationships?

Answer 1

There isn't an explicit sync command, but Yii does support MANY_MANY relationships through Active Record and will keep the data in the join table up-to-update automatically if you stick purely with Active Record.