Laravel join only using Eloquent

Question

Is there a way in Laravel 4.2 to join two tables using Eloquent alone? Consider the following.

I have a games table:

id | slug | name
---|------|------------------
1  | g1   | Game 1
2  | g2   | Game 2

With a respective model (models/Game.php):

class Game extends Eloquent {

    protected $table = 'games';

    protected $hidden = array();

    public function teams() {
        return $this->hasMany('Team');
    }
}

I have a teams table where each team is associated to a game:

id | slug | name         | game_id
---|------|--------------|--------
1  | t1   | Team 1       | 1
2  | t2   | Team 2       | 1
3  | t3   | Team 3       | 2
4  | t4   | Team 4       | 2

And it's model (models/Team.php):

class Team extends Eloquent {

    protected $table = 'teams';

    protected $hidden = array();

    public function game() {
        return $this->belongsTo('Game');
    }
}

Now what I want to do, is generate a table of the teams within the system (There could be thousands) along with it's associated game joined up on teams.game_id = games.id.

id | slug | name   | game
---------------------------
1  | t1   | Team 1 | Game 1
2  | t2   | Team 2 | Game 1
3  | t3   | Team 3 | Game 2
4  | t4   | Team 4 | Game 2

I can get this working using Eloquent by simply grabbing all teams using Team:all(), passing this to my view and then doing the following:

<h1>Teams</h1>
@if (isset($teams) && $teams->count() > 0)
<table class="table table-striped table-hover table-bordered">
    <tr>
        <th>#</th>
        <th>Slug</th>
        <th>Name</th>
        <th>Game</th>
    </tr>
@foreach ($teams as $t)
    <tr>
        <td>{{{ $t->id }}}</td>
        <td>{{{ $t->slug }}}</td>
        <td>{{{ $t->name }}}</td>
        <td>{{{ $t->game->name }}}</td>
    </tr>
@endforeach
</table>
@else
<p>There are currently no teams stored in the system</p>
@endif

However, with this approach I am repeatedly querying the database for the game details for every team which isn't ideal. I would ideally like to perform one query, joining games onto teams using only Eloquent and my defined relationships. Is there a way I can do this all in one go without having to use the query builder? I did give it a go with the following code, which seems to work but I don't feel this solution is elegant enough:

$teams = Team::leftJoin('games', function($join){
    $join->on('teams.game_id', '=', 'games.id');
})
->get(array('teams.id', 'teams.slug', 'teams.name', 'games.name'));

Thanks,

Answer 1

I think the Eager Loading would suit your needs. Something like:

Team::with('game')->get()