title: Need another way to extract data to display in Cakephp view
body: <p>I have tables from a previous custom cms migrated to cakephp. The models, controllers, views, helpers have been created and I can get them to work now. However, I have a bit of a problem with rendering the text fields. </p>
  
  <p>The text from the original tables contained markup codes that need to be parsed so that they can be displayed properly. I've made a helper for this and so far it can parse most of the markup codes now. Left with doing the parsing for nested lists and codes which look like this:</p>
  
  <p>{img src="showImage.php?xxxx" alt="" link=""}
  where xxxx is the id in the images table.</p>
  
  <p>From the previous system, this actually makes calls to the images table and lookup the actual url of the image so that it can be displayed and there can be quite a few of these codes in a record. The helper can extract the image ids but from what I understand in Cakephp, views and helpers are mostly for rendering data already retrieved by the controllers. If this is the case then it seems I won't be able to make calls to the images table and pass those image ids to get what I need to display the images or rather it's not recommended. Now I'm a bit lost as to where to put the code to get the image data if helpers cannot call on controllers.</p>
  
  <p>Sorry, Cake newbie here and still learning how to use cake properly so if you can just point me to the correct direction -- where to put the code or maybe if I need to create a plugin or component or anything -- will be greatly appreciated. </p>