saveAssociated and $this->id

I have a Message model that hasMany MessageRecipients. I have a form that posts data into a controller which passes it straight to a method in the Message model.

Three questions really...

1) How should the form be set up?

The MessageRecipient model expects two fields; message_id and user_id. When I create the form I add a control called 'MessageRecipient'. This just passes a keyed array of user ids. How can I make those sit in the user_id field? Naming the field MessageRecipient.user_id is not the answer.

2) Once the data array arrives at the model it is not in the same shape as that suggested by the book. The book suggests it should look like this:

$data = array(

    'Article' => array('title' => 'My first article'),

    'Comment' => array(

        array('body' => 'Comment 1', 'user_id' => 1),

        array('body' => 'Comment 2', 'user_id' => 12),

        array('body' => 'Comment 3', 'user_id' => 40),

    ),

);

... rather than:

array(

'Message' => array(

'subject' => '',

'content' => 'Test',

'user_id' => 1,

'MessageRecipient' => array(

(int) 0 => 2,

(int) 1 => 3

)

)

)

... as passed by the form. Do the numeric keys really matter? How do I get the array to be in this shape:

array(

'Message' => array(

'subject' => '',

'content' => 'Test',

'user_id' => 1,

'MessageRecipient' => array(

array ('user_id' => 2),

array ('user_id' => 3)

)

)

)

... without parsing the data?

3) After the data is saved using $this->saveAssociated() I'd expect the id of the new message to be in $this->id, yet it is always null. I can reach $this->MessageRecipient->id and $this->MessageRecipient->field('message_id') but that feels wrong. What's the recommended approach?

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