Best practice for Phalcon model relationship - phalcon

Question

Loving working with Phalcon, but have concerns about the best practice for model relationships. For example, if I have the following db relationship:
http://i.imgur.com/8kZYomW.png
And create a relationship in the Thing model like:
public function initialize()
{
$this->hasOne('categoryId', 'Categories', 'id', array('alias' => 'cat'));
}
The following easily prints off beautifully:
{{ thing.cat.name }}
Whereas pre-phalcon I would join the 2 to make 1 round trip, the elegance is worth the 2 DB hits...
... until you are grabbing a list of say 1,000 Things and looping through like:
{{ for thing in things }}
<li>{{ thing.cat.name }}</li>
{{ endfor }}
Then I am getting 1,001 DB calls (assuming there are 1,000 different categories I guess).
What is the best practice for dealing with this scenario? And not just for a simple relationship like this where the lookup could be fairly static and easy to cache. What about a more dynamic relationship where you may be listing invoices between historical dates, their customers and the category of the customer?

Answer 1

For building more complex queries you probably want to check those query builder examples.
Essential (not tested) is:
$things = $this->modelsManager->createBuilder()
->from('Things', 'thing')
->leftJoin('Categories', 'category.id = thing.categoryId', 'category')
->getQuery()
->execute();
var_dump($things->toArray());

Answer 2

Adding 'reusable' => true may help.
public function initialize()
{
$this->hasOne('categoryId', 'Categories', 'id', array(
'alias' => 'cat', 'reusable' => true));
}
http://docs.phalconphp.com/en/latest/reference/models-cache.html#reusable-related-records

Answer 3

I am not 100% sure what you're asking. Though if I understand correctly are you looking for something like:
// Thing model
public function initialize()
{
$this->belongsTo('categoryId', 'Categories', 'id');
}
// Category model
public function initialize()
{
$this->hasMany('id', 'Things', 'categoryId', array('alias' => 'things'));
}
// Output things in certain category
foreach($category->things as $thing)
{
echo $thing->name;
}
If I have completely misunderstood your question, I apologise.
Hope it helps!