Database One-to-Many with two foreign key fields in Laravel

Question

I have been trying to define some Database schema to use the laravel framework. I want to model a Football match. The first step I wanted to do is to define the Entity Relationship diagram, but I found this (which I thought would be quite trivial) to be confusing in some aspects.

First, the obvious approach is to say that a Match is related with two Teams, and a Team is related to any number of Matches. So, we would have a "Many to Many" relationship.

But the implementation of a many to many relation is to have two tables and an intermediate table to relate both entities. I think this would be too much, when I know that a Match will always have two Teams and simply having two columns (local_id and visitant_id) with foreign keys to the Teams table would be enough. Plus, I want to be able to do:

Match::find(1)->local() or Match::find(1)->visitant();

So, thinking on this I am implementing a "One to Many" relation, but with this I have another issue. To retrieve all the matches a Team has played I would like to do:

Team::find(1)->matches(); 

But I cannot do this because I can only specify one key column when defining the matches() method in eloquent (by default it would be team_id, but it should be visitant_id and local_id).

Answer 1

After some more digging into the source code I found there is a way to actually keep my database schema as it is and achieve what I want (at least in Laravel 4). I posted my problem in github and Taylor Otwell (creator of the framework) gave me the correct answer: https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/1272

Quoting him, it should be as easy as this:

class Team extends Eloquent  {
    public function allMatches()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Match', 'visitant_id')->orWhere('local_id', $this->id);
    }
}

And then...

$team = Team::find(2);
$matches = $team->allMatches;

Answer 2

This is one of those famous database design problems. Friendship relationships, for instance, suffer from that same difficulty. Since you are using Eloquent, I would suggest you to stick with many to many approach and have an extra boolean column local on your intermediate table

class Match extends Eloquent {
    public $includes = array('team'); // Always eager load teams
    public function teams() {
        return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('team')->with('local');
    }
    public function get_local() {
        foreach ($this->teams as $team) {
            if ($team->pivot->local) return $team;
        }
    }
    public function get_visitant()   {
        foreach ($this->teams as $team) {
            if (!$team->pivot->local) return $team;
        }
    }
}

class Team extends Eloquent  {
    public function matches() {
        return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('match')->with('local');
    }
    // I'm doing separate queries here because a team may have
    // hundreds of matches and it's not worth looping through
    // all of them to retrieve the local ones
    public function matches_as_local()  {
        return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('match')->with('local')
            ->where('pivot_local', '=', 1);
    }
    public function matches_as_visitant()  {
        return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('match')->with('local')
            ->where('pivot_local', '=', 0);
    }
}

Obs:

The method has_many_and_belongs_to(...)->with('field') has nothing to do with eager loading. It tells Eloquent to load the intermediate table column field and put that in the pivot.

Usage:

$match = Match::find(1);

$match->local; // returns local team
$match->visitant; // returns visitant team

$team = Team::find(1);
$team->matches; // returns all matches
$team->matches_as_local; // ...
$team->matches_as_visitant; // ...

foreach ($team->matches as $match) {
    if ($match->pivot->local) {
        // put nice local icon here
    } else {
        // put nice visitant icon here
    }
}