I'm trying to understand which variable to use then. E.g. a book has one author. So the BookController has (among others) 2 members: author and Author
What is the meaning of those 2? When to use which? It looks like that for a new book (isNewRecord returns true), both are of type AkAssociatedRecord, but for an existing book both are of type Author. Unfortunately the find method for both classes is different: For AkAssociatedRecord it will return the associated author, but for Author it will return an array with all authors in the database. So I have to be careful which function to call in which context and that's why I'm confused.
Christoph
CommentAuthorpogeybait4883
In a controller some magic happens when you have associations with models. A variable, in your case $author, is created and refers to a specific instance of the Author class. the $Author variable refers to the class in general.