How to Get User Group Names in Joomla 2.5 - joomla

Question

I'm writing a Joomla 2.5 component that I had been developing in Joomla 1.7. I have been using code like this:
$user = JFactory::getUser();
$groups = $user->get('groups');
The $groups array would contain a list of ids with the group name as the index. Joomla 2.5 seems to have scrapped this functionality. I have been unable to find out how to get the group names without directly querying the database. Is there any method for getting a list of the groups a user is a member of without having to resort to querying the database?

Answer 1

The code I generated below gets the names of all the groups the user is a part of and stores them in the variable $groupNames separated by line breaks:
foreach ($user->groups as $groupId => $value){
$db = JFactory::getDbo();
$db->setQuery(
'SELECT `title`' .
' FROM `#__usergroups`' .
' WHERE `id` = '. (int) $groupId
);
$groupNames .= $db->loadResult();
$groupNames .= '<br/>';
}
print $groupNames;
It technically queries the database but is done via the Joomla API. This is working well for me on Joomla 2.5.

Answer 2

Yes, this changed.
But what you should be using instead is:
JFactory::getUser()->getAuthorisedGroups();
or just getUserGroups

Answer 3

Real snippet:
$user = JFactory::getUser();
$db = JFactory::getDBO();
$db->setQuery($db->getQuery(true)
->select('*')
->from("#__usergroups")
);
$groups=$db->loadRowList();
$userGroups = $user->groups;
$return=array();
foreach ($groups as $key=>$g){
if (array_key_exists($g[0],$userGroups)) array_push($return,$g[4]);
}
$groups=$return;
/////printing groupnames for current user/////////////
print_r($groups);

Answer 4

Here it is:
<?php
$user =& JFactory::getUser();
foreach ($user->groups as $key => $value){
echo $key.'<br>';
}
?>
This will print all the user group names to the screen. The user group names are the "keys" of the array $user->groups.