Yii CSqlDataProvider confusion - yii

Question

I am having some trouble understanding CSqlDataProvider and how it works.
When I am using CActiveDataProvider, the results can be accessed as follows:
$data->userProfile['first_name'];
However, when I use CSqlDataProvider, I understand that the results are returned as an array not an object. However, the structure of the array is flat. In other words, I am seeing the following array:
$data['first_name']
instead of
$data['userProfile']['first_name']
But the problem here is what if I have another joined table (let's call it 'author') in my sql code that also contains a first_name field? With CActiveDataProvider, the two fields are disambiguated, so I can do the following to access the two fields:
$data->userProfile['first_name'];
$data->author['first_name'];
But with CSqlDataProvider, there doesn't seem to be anyway I can access the data as follows:
$data['userProfile']['first_name'];
$data['author']['first_name'];
So, outside of assigning a unique name to those fields directly inside my SQL, by doing something like this:
select author.first_name as author_first_name, userProfile.first_name as user_first_name
And then referring to them like this:
$data['author_first_name'];
$data['user_first_name']
is there anyway to get CSqlDataProvider to automatically structure the arrays so they are nested in the same way that CActiveDataProvider objects are? So that I can call them by using $data['userProfile']['first_name']
Or is there another class I should be using to obtain these kinds of nested arrays?
Many thanks!

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, no Yii DB methods break out JOIN query results in to 2D arrays like you are looking for. I think you will need to - as you suggest - alias the column names in your select statement.
MySql returns a single row of data when you JOIN tables in a query, and CSqlDataProvider returns exactly what MySql does: single tabular array representation indexed/keyed by the column names, just like your query returns.
If you want to break apart your results into a multi-dimensional array I would either alias the columns, or use a regular CActiveDataProvider (which you can still pass complex queries and joins in via CDbCritiera).