This chapter deals with one of the most important aspects of a CakePHP application: the relationship between models, also known as model bindings or associations.

Being an integral part of any application's logic, it is of crucial importance that we master all aspects of how model bindings can be manipulated to get the data we need, when we need it.

In order to do so, we will go through a series of recipes that will show us how to change the way bindings are fetched, what bindings and what information from a binding is returned, how to create new bindings, and how to build hierarchical data structures.