CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phplaraveleloquent
Graham
Graham

Reputation: 162

Laravel RESTful API Resolve Foreign Keys

So I'm building a RESTful API in Laravel. So far I have a simpler controller that looks like this:

class TripController extends Controller
{
  public function index()
  {
    $data = Trip::all();

    return $data;
  }
}

And I get this back:

[
  {
  "id": 1,
  "created_at": "2015-07-06 21:01:03",
  "updated_at": "2015-07-06 21:01:03",
  "created_by": 1,
  "updated_by": 1,
  "description": "Sample Trip",
  "aircraft_id": 1
  }
]

Which is exactly what I asked for. The thing is 'created_by', 'updated_by', and 'aircraft_id' are foreign keys. I know I could start resolving my foreign keys using the relationships I've set up in my models, such as:

$createdByName = App\Trip::first()->createdBy()->get('name');

But this would require some looping over the collection to replace the id's with the information needed from the foreign keys (basically the names). Is there a clever way to do this in Laravel when just using it to return JSON?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2173

Answers (1)

Moritz Ewert
Moritz Ewert

Reputation: 662

If you declared the relations on the model via eloquent you could just use eager loading to deliver the related models.

Trip::with('aircraft','createdBy','updatedBy')->all();

Otherwise, if you only want to include something like the name attribute you could add an attribute to your Trip model using laravels accessor methods Define an accessor like this:

public function getAircraftNameAttribute()
{
    return $this->aircraft->name;
}

And include it in the models array- or json-form by adding it to the $appends array:

protected $appends = ['aircraft_name'];

See the documentation for that here.

Upvotes: 2

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