Noob Having Trouble With Passing Department Name To Employee Index

[beentold]

Hello everyone! First of all, Larry, thank you for the Yii tutorial!!!
I have just gone through it and I ran into a little bit of a dead end.

 

In the Employee controller (line 126) it says:

$dataProvider=new CActiveDataProvider('Employee');

I would like to add something like this:

SELECT name FROM department WHERE id = employee.departmentId

And then pass the department.name to the view instead of the employee.departmentId. I'm sorry if this is total BS. I'm a noob in MVC (and PHP/MySQL too, to be honest).

 

I'm sure I could just find out how to write a proper MySQL query and pass it on in an array, but I think there must be a "simpler" (or more elegant) way to do this.

 

Thanks in advance for any replies!

[Larry]

Thanks for the nice words. Just to confirm, you're trying to change how data is provided to a widget (like CGridView)? 

[beentold]

Hello Larry. Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post!

 

Thanks for the nice words. Just to confirm, you're trying to change how data is provided to a widget (like CGridView)? 

Yes, I think that's it. Basically, the way I understand it, CActiveDataProvider in EmployeeController.php on line 126 gets the employee table as a whole and then passes it on to the index view.

		$dataProvider=new CActiveDataProvider('Employee');
		$this->render('index',array(
			'dataProvider'=>$dataProvider,
		));

Which in turn passes it on to the _view widget.

<?php $this->widget('zii.widgets.CListView', array(
	'dataProvider'=>$dataProvider,
	'itemView'=>'_view',
)); ?>

In _view.php the list of employees is generated. The information from $dataProvider is now in $data. And on lines 12 and 13 the departmentId is displayed.

	<b><?php echo CHtml::encode($data->getAttributeLabel('departmentId')); ?>:</b>
	<?php echo CHtml::encode($data->departmentId); ?>

I would like to lookup the department name and display that instead.
Is there a way I can manipulate $dataProvider in the controller to include the departmentName (from the table department) instead of departmentId (from the table employee) - or in addition to it?