Laravel belongsTo not working

Question

I have 2 models in my app, 'User' & 'MedicineType' (each User belongs to one MedicineType).

I made the one-to-many relation between two model using belongsTo() and hasMany(). hasMany() relation works perfectly but belongTo() doesn't work. Does anyone know where did I make a mistake?

User::find(1)->medicine_type [this returns nothing]

MedicineType::find(1)->users [this returns users]

Here's the code to Models:

class MedicineType extends Eloquent {

    public function users()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('User');
    }
}


class User extends Eloquent {

    public function medicine_type()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('MedicineType');
    }
}

And here is my database structure:

users:
    id
    name
    medicine_type_id 

medicine_types:
    id
    name

Answer 1

The reason your relation is not working is not because of the relations specified in the model, but because of the method naming in the User model and not specifying the foreign key.

Instead of:

public function medicine_type()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('MedicineType');
}

Use:

public function medicineType()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('MedicineType', 'id');
}

I hope this works for you ;)

Everything together:

<?php // app/models/MedicineType.php

class MedicineType extends Eloquent {

   // Determines which database table to use
   protected $table = 'medicine_types';

   public function users() 
   {
      return $this->hasMany('User');
   }

}

and:

<?php // app/models/User.php

class User extends Eloquent {

   // Determines which database table to use
   protected $table = 'users';

   public function medicineType() 
   {
      return $this->belongsTo('MedicineType', 'id');
   }

}

Testing if it works:

$user = User::find(1);
return $user->medicineType->name;

This successfully returns the related medicine_type's name.

I hope this helps you further ;)

Answer 2

Maybe there's an issue with Eloquent finding the foreign key. Try this:

class User extends Eloquent {

    public function medicine_type()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('MedicineType', 'medicine_type_id');
    }
}

EDIT:

Also, Eloquent tries to find the table "medicinetypes" and not "medecine_types", so you need to specify that as well using the $table variable.

class MedicineType extends Eloquent {
    protected $table = 'medicine_types';

    public function users()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('User');
    }
}

Answer 3

I made the stupid mistake of not adding the "return" in the relationship method!

Make sure you return the relationship... Obviously this will not work:

public function medicineType() 
   {
      $this->belongsTo('MedicineType', 'id');
   }

Answer 4

I change "medicine_type" to "medicineType" and everythings got OK...