Before PHP5 one had to resort to specific return values or drastic measures like trigger_error(). Planning exceptions, I found out, is just as important as class design. At any point where a developer needs to handle the possibility of an exception being thrown he needs to know: what Exceptions can I expect and what Exceptions do I plan to catch? In this post I'll show some important aspects to consider when planning exceptions.

He starts off with a basic example of an exception, throwing it and catching it, as a part of a SOAP client sample and looks at things to catch, how to catch them and doing fun things like rethrowing and extending basic exception types.

The problem with that solution is that it requires you to change the way you define your model relations. [...] Rather try to change your code to suit your needs, and let CakePHP do what it does best: act as a framework.

The technique approaches the associations differently - loaded and called when you make the call to expects() versus just automatically. They include the code to make it all work for an extension to the Model (AppModel), and extension to the AppModel (Title), and finally the TitlesController that shows the deliberate calls to expects to pull in the models.