How to query user with posts in Laravel

Question

I'm new to Laravel. I want to display all post including the user who posted the post. I have a simple query which displays all post, and displays selected post using post id.

public function view_post($id)
    {
        $post = User::find($id);

        dd($post);

    }

This is working perfectly fine but I wanted to display all post with the user who posted the post. How can I do this in proper way?

Answer 1

Right now, it is possible to get the Posts by first getting the User then using that ID, getting the Posts. Note: this is not the recommended way of using Laravel with relationships:

$user = User::find($id);
$posts = Post::where("user_id", "=", $user->id)->get();

While this would work (assuming you had a model for Post with a user_id key), but the correct way is to define the relationship in the models. For this one, it would be hasMany() and belongsTo() on User and Post respectfully. Here is your User.php model class:

class User extends Eloquent {
  protected $table = "users";

  public function posts(){
    return $this->hasMany("Post");
  }
}

And make sure to define the inverse in your Post.php model class:

class Post extends Eloquent {
  protected $table = "posts";

  public function user(){
    return $this->belongsTo("User");
  }
}

Lastly, you can query this relationship in your controller using the following:

$user = User::find($id);
$posts = $user->posts()->get();

This will also enforce integrity by forcing any updates/saves to use the right user_id key. There's some pretty extensive documentation on how to use the Eloquent style of database querying, check it out here:

Laravel - Eloquent

Hope that helps!

Edit

To pass this to a view, add the following to your controller:

public function view_post($id){
    $user = User::find($id);
    $posts = $user->posts()->get();

    return View::make("view")->with(array("user" => $user, "posts" => $posts));
}

You will need a file in your app/views directory named (in this case) view.blade.php which "echos" all the information about the user and the posts:

<h2>User: {{ $user->id }} - {{ $user->email }}</h2>
<br/>
<h2>Posts:</h2>
@foreach($posts AS $post)
<p> {{ $post->id }}: {{ $post->content }}</p>
@endforeach

Etc etc. Note, I have no idea what columns your users and posts table has, but using $user->column or $post->column will echo the contents of that named column.

Here's the documentation for Views and Responses, which would help you with this issue:

Laravel - Views and Responses