How to retrieve full data of record by its foreign key in laravel?

Question

I've been trying to figure out the proper way to get all the data from a record via a foreign key. I have simple app where users can add books to their "bookshelf".

Here are my tables:

USERS

ID   |   NAME   | 

BOOKS

ID   |   PAGES   |   NUMBER_OF_CHAPTERS

BOOKSHELF

ID   |   USER_ID (foreign key to `users.id`)   | 

BOOKSHELF_BOOKS

ID   |   BOOKSHELF_ID (foreign key to `bookshelf.id`)   | BOOKS_ID (foreign key to `books.id`)

In my Eloquent Models, a bookshelf hasMany books and bookshelf_books belongsTo a bookshelfand I have set those up in my models.

What happens is users create a "bookshelf" and add books to it from the list of books.

I'm at the point where I need to render the bookshelf with the user's books.

When I retrieve my bookshelf books with a call like Bookshelf::find($id)->books, the books that belong to that bookshelf return just fine..but only columns from the bookshelf table. So I get in return the bookshelf id, the user id, and the book id.

What I want to have returned is all the data of the book itself when i query for books in the bookshelf, not just it's id. E.G. [{"book_id":1, "pages":364, "number_of_chapters":14},{"book_id":2, "pages":211, "number_of_chapters":9}].

I've been scratching my head all day trying to figure out how to take this "join" one step further in Laravel/Eloquent ORM.

Would love any help with this, thanks!!

Answer 1

Just eager load the relationship

Change

Bookshelf::find($id)->books

to

Bookshelf::with('books')->find($id)->books

Answer 2

What about just doing it manually, and building your own array.

  $bookshelf = Bookshelf::find($id)->books;
  $thebooks = array();

  foreach($bookshelf as $val){
  $book = Book::find($val->book_id);
  $thebooks[] = $book;
  }

Then just return $thebooks to the View. Which will be an array of book models.