There is a confirmation dialog that can be passed as one of the
fields, so it puts "onclick='confirm(etc)'", but I want

onclick="if(confirm('test'){somejsfunction();}"

What the function call does is essentially ajax, but looking at the
$ajax helper doesn't provide an obvious solution (from what I can
tell)

I'm beginning to become annoyed with some of the helper functions for
the views. It seems that every time I try to add customization I have
to read the cookbook over and over to try to figure out how to do what
I could easily do with straight html.

I absolutely love the model and controller implementation, but is
anyone other than me starting to think that the only cake functions I
want to use in the views is form creation and creating (automagic)
input fields?