Retrieving tables within your Cake database

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I have been working lately on adding an installation process to my forum plugin. For this process I needed a way to retrieve a list of tables within a selected database, to make sure there are no table name conflicts. After asking the question on Twitter, I got the answer thanks to @pierremartin and @mark_story (of course!). You simply use the ConnectionManager class.

$db = ConnectionManager::getDataSource('default');
$tables = $db->listSources();

Very handy, and a lot easier then writing a custom query with execute().

2 Comments

  • Awesome find, Miles. I'll be sure to use this at some point. Thanks for sharing!
    Brendon Kozlowski ⋅
  • nice tip.

    I always use it when I want to implement my old (non-CakePHP) database class singleton in CakePHP
    Robust Solution ⋅