Customizing JSON output CakePHP
I don't fully understand what you mean by "remove the entire array wrapped in "users"" and "remove every object being a member of "User"", but according to your desired output format example, you'll need to extract and pass the exact data that you want to be encoded to json_encode, instead of passing everything using compact.
Extracting could be done with the Set or the Hash class (depending on your Cake version)
Assuming your model returns the data in the default CakePHP format, this for example:
json_encode(Set::extract('/User/.', $users));should give you a structure like this:
[{ "user_id": "2", "email": "email@test.com", "name": "Blah"}]and with multiple users it should look like this
[{ "user_id": "1", "email": "foo@test.com", "name": "Bar"},{ "user_id": "2", "email": "email@test.com", "name": "Blah"}]
Use like this:
$users= (Set::extract('/User/.', $users));pr($users);It will remove Model from result Array and then json_encode or whatever further usage.
More library functions Set class Here and Hash class Here