CakePHP and other popular frameworks tend to hardcode the relationship (e.g. <a href="http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/views.html">http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/views.html</a> ) here in their example, echo $this->Html->link('edit', array( 'action' => 'edit', $post['Post']['id'])); ?> the link can only go to the Edit controller.