How to use Laravel Scout & TNTSearch in combination with relational databases?

Question

Let's say I have a table 'users' that I want to search with Laravel Scout. It has a lot of attributes, among which the hobby of the user.

• The hobby of the user is not directly placed in the users table,
  but by a relational table. So a hobby-id is placed for each user in the users table.

• Now when I search for football, this is not indexed by Laravel
  Scout. Only the id of the hobby football is indexed, but that is of course not how I want it.

Anyone knows how I can make sure that searching for football returns the users that have football as a hobby?

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

You have a full control over what exactly is being indexed via toSearchableArray() so that you can do something along the lines of

class User extends Model
{
    use Searchable;

    // ...

    public function toSearchableArray()
    {
        return array_merge($this->toArray(), [
            'hobby' => $this->hobby === null ? '' : $this->hobby->name;
        ]);
    }

    // ...

    public function hobby()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Hobby::class);
    }

}