I have a bunch of name/email fields in my form like this:

data[Friend][0][name]
data[Friend][1][name]
data[Friend][2][name]

etc.

and

data[Friend][0][email]
data[Friend][1][email]
data[Friend][2][email]

etc.

I have a custom validation rule on each one that checks to see if the corresponding field is filled in. Ie. if data[Friend][2][name] then data[Friend][2][email] MUST be filled in.

FYI, heres what one of the two rules look like:

My form validation rule: ( I have an email validation too but that's irrelevant here)

'name' => array(
    'checkEmail' => array(
      'rule' => 'hasEmail',
      'message' => 'You must fill in the name field',
      'last' => true
    )
)

My custom rule code:

function hasEmail($data){
  $name = array_values($data);
  $name = $name[0]; 
  if(strlen($name) == 0){
    return empty($this->data['Friend']['email']);
  }
  return true;
}

I need to make it so that one of the pairs should be filled in as a minimum. It can be any as long as the indexes correspond.

I can't figure a way, as if I set the form rule to be required or allowEmpty false, it fails on ALL empty fields. How can I check for the existence of 1 pair and if present, carry on?

Also, I need to strip out all of the remaining empty [Friend] fields, so my saveAll() doesn't save a load of empty rows, but I think I can handle that part using extract in my controller. The main problem is this validation. Thanks.