CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqllaraveleloquent
GalahadXVI
GalahadXVI

Reputation: 839

Creating a relationship in laravel

I'm new to laravel and I'm not really understanding how relationships work using it. I think I'm just having an "off" day as I'm struggling to do something relatively simple.

I have 2 tables. items and inventory

Each entry within the inventory table has a column labeled itemid and userid.

So for example, this could be the table inventory with its entries -

  id | userid | itemid  | ...
+-----------------------------------
| 1  |   1    |    1    | ...
| 2  |   1    |    4    | ...
| 3  |   1    |    6    | ...
| 4  |   2    |    1    | ...

(there are more columns but these are just the columns that link everything together)

Basically, what I'm trying to do is get all of the items that a user has. My normal method would just be using a JOIN query but I'm not really sure how it works in Laravel.

I have 2 very simple models just to retrieve the data from each table

Inventory.php 

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Inventory extends Model
{
  protected $table = 'inventory';
}

Item.php 

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Item extends Model
{
  protected $table = 'items';
}

How can I get the item data for each entry within the inventory table? I've tried defining relationships and such using the eloquent documentation but I must be doing something wrong.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 77

Answers (1)

u_mulder
u_mulder

Reputation: 54831

In your case you have a many-to-many relationship between User and Item, so there's no need to use Inventory as a model, cause inventory table is just a pivot table.

Your models can look like:

class User extends Model
{

    public function inventory_items()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(
            'Item',                             // joined model
            'inventory',                        // pivot table name
            'userid',                           // column name in pivot table
            'itemid'                            // column name in pivot table
        );
    }
}

Items of user you can get with

$user = User::find($user_id);
$items = $user->inventory_items()->get();

Same technique can be applied to Item model.

Update: for retrieving additional pivot table colums - update your inventory_items() as:

public function inventory_items()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany(
        'Item',                             // joined model
        'inventory',                        // pivot table name
        'userid',                           // column name in pivot table
        'itemid'                            // column name in pivot table
    )->withPivot('column_1', 'column_2')
}

Upvotes: 2

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