Tim Koschuetzki has posted this tutorial today about how to create form fields with combined information from more than one database column.

Two days ago, someone on #cakephp had the problem of getting combined values out of the Model->generateList() function in CakePHP. I advised him on doing some Set::extract() things, which at the end of the day got rather complicated. As a result, I was conscience-stricken. Here is a much more elegant solution I could come up with.

He introduces the generateList function first, showing how to use it to create a simple select list in your form. Unfortunately, it only understands using one field at a time, so he worked around it, creating a solution - his myGenerateList function - that handles things similarly and returns the same kinds of results (so it can be used with the set() function as well).