On the Debuggable blog, Tim Koschutzki has added a quick post looking at fetching ENUM options of a database's fields in a CakePHP application.

The field users.level is an enum type and can have the values 'guest', 'user', 'admin', 'superadmin' and 'root'. The problem is that it could be possible that new levels were added in the future. [...] So what I came up with is a very simple behavior that can extract the options for any ENUM field. It uses simple caching in order for the query to not be run all the time, so make sure to clear your cache as you update your enum field options in the db.

His code snippet creates an EnumerableBehavior for the model and grabs the column names from the given table to check the access level for each and write them out to a cache.