$this->Model->save not updating, $this->Model->saveField

I was working with my User model in my Users controller. I wanted to store the profile_id inside of the users table. It should’ve worked like this.

1. Save a user in the users table: $this->User->save($this->data);
2. Save a profile in the profiles table: $this->User->Profile->($this->data);
3. Update the same user in the user table with the just made profile id.

And of course this is where things get complicated. CakePHP didn’t want to save my data. Here’s the code.

  if ( $this->User->save($this->data) ) {
  
    $this->User->Profile->save($this->data);
    $this->User->save( array("User" => array("profile_id" => $this->User->Profile->id) ) ;
    
  }

It felt to me as if CakePHP’s save() method wasn’t working right. It is supposed to decided to insert or update a record based on weather an primary key is present. It should be present if save($this->data) is called, it should set the id. But it didn’t and nobody knows why!

So what to do? I used $this->User->saveField() instead. Here’s the new code.

  if ( $this->User->save($this->data) ) {
  
    $this->User->Profile->save($this->data);
    $this->User->saveField("profile_id", $this->User->Profile->id);
    
  }

Why couldn’t CakePHP do what it’s documentation said it could do? What was I doing wrong? In any case, after fixing this I changed the way my models work so that I no longer need to update the user table at all.