[ Thanks to Xenofon
Papadopoulos for this link. ]
“I’ve been using CakePHP for a little while, and a common
problem that keeps arising again and a again is that of handling
NULL values in model-based lists of my forms. Consider the
following common scenario:“You need to keep track of some some people. For simplicity,
let’s say you care only about their name, last name and country of
origin. Furthermore, you select the countries for a dictionary: a
predefined list of countries, residing in its own table. Your
database would be similar to this:”