How to Get User Group Names in Joomla 2.5

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.