cakephp3 own query builder - mysql

Question

i'm new in cakephp, and i'm following the toutorial, i came from other languages and is not usual for me to read query like this:
public function findTagged(Query $query, array $options)
{
$columns = [
'Articles.id', 'Articles.user_id', 'Articles.title',
'Articles.body', 'Articles.published', 'Articles.created',
'Articles.slug',
];
$query = $query
->select($columns)
->distinct($columns);
if (empty($options['tags'])) {
// If there are no tags provided, find articles that have no tags.
$query->leftJoinWith('Tags')
->where(['Tags.title IS' => null]);
} else {
// Find articles that have one or more of the provided tags.
$query->innerJoinWith('Tags')
->where(['Tags.title IN' => $options['tags']]);
}
return $query->group(['Articles.id']);
}
This is a simple query and it's easy to understand ,but if i have a more complex query with a lot of join etc, is there the possibility to write your own query with sql sintax, can you help me translating this code to a query written in sql?
Thanks

Answer 1

You can write directly execute an SQL query with $connection->execute() (https://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/orm/database-basics.html#running-select-statements) but I would recommend to stick to cakephp's ORM.
If you want to know how the query that you posted above translates into SQL, I would recommend to use the DebugKit. If you have in your app configuration debug = true, you will see this red rectangle at the bottem right corner, when you open your app in the browser. Click on it and click on "Sql queries": you will find the generated SQL from the query above somewhere in there. Alternatively you could use query logging (see here: https://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/orm/database-basics.html#database-query-logging)