Hey! Total CakePHP noob here.

This is sort of a two fold question. In a view that is used for adding user objects I would like to use a drop down (selection) field in the form.

Each user belongs to a group so when I add a user I want a drop down that contains all of the groups that the user could possibly join. Currently the group_id field is a textfield. I know how to force it to be a selection field, but I don't know how to populate the selection with the names of the groups programmatically.

The Current method:

echo $form->input('group_id', array(
    '1' => 'NameOfGroup1',
    '2' => 'NameOfGroup2',
    '3' => 'NameOfGroup3')
    );

I want to generate the options array programmatically though.

echo $form->input('group_id', $this->Group->find('list'));

This doesn't work though. I get an error:

Undefined property: View::$Group [APP/views/users/add.ctp, line 8]

To me this means that I don't have access to the Group object from inside my user view.

How can I accomplish this? Again, I want to do it programmatically so that it updates as I add groups or remove them.