How to chain eloquent relations in laravel?

Question

So far I was extracting the relation objects as arrays and then doing something like:

App\Model::find($id)

But however is there a way to do something like:

Auth::user()->group()->members()

It works until Auth::user()->group but no further chaining. Please help if you've done something. Or I'm just newbie.

Answer 1

You could use eager loading to load the user's group and then load all of the members of that group.

$user = User::with(['group', 'group.members'])->find(1);

// OR if you already have a user object (Like when using the Auth facade)
$user = Auth::user()->load(['group', 'group.members']);

foreach ($user->group->members as $member) {
    // Do something with a member
}

However, if you essentially want to jump down the structure a level, and get all the members related to a user, you could use the hasManyThrough relationship, in that a user has many members, through a group.

// In your User model
public function members()
{
    return $this->hasManyThrough(Member::class, Group::class);
}

That way you can simply access the members directly through the user:

$members = Auth::user()->members;

Instead of doing a query to access the user's group and then doing another query to access that group's members, Laravel would use a single query with a join to get you the members.

Take a look at the hasManyThrough relationship here