Laravel: Eloquent how to update a model and related models in one go

Question

Does anyone know if it is possitble to do the folowing:

Let's say we have a model called User and a model calledd BestFriend. The relation between the User and the best friend is 1:1.

I would like for these cases be able to do something like this, change my city and the city of my friend at the same time.

$me = User::find(1);  $me->update(array( 'city' => 'amsterdam', 'bestfriend.city' => 'amsterdam' )); 

So basically I would like to know if Eloquent is smart enough to understand the relationship based on the array key 'bestfriend.city'.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Update:

Found the solution on the Laravel forums but im posting it here as well if someone else is looking for the same thing :)

In the model you add

// In your model... public function setBestFriendArrayAttribute($values) {     $this->bestfriend->update($values); } 

And then you can call it like this

$me->update(array(     'city' => 'amsterdam',     'BestFriendArray' => array(         'city' => 'amsterdam'     ) )); 

Works like a charm!

Answer 1

You don't need to set it on your model. You can do it on your controller like this.

$me = User::find(1)->bestFriend()->update(array( 'city' => 'amsterdam', 'bestfriend.city' => 'amsterdam' )); 

I just modified your update a little bit.

Answer 2

Eloquent is pretty smart, but I don't believe it can do that. You would have to update User and BestFriend independently. But once you've done that, Eloquent does have methods for attaching the two.

$me = User::find(1); $bff= BestFriend::find(1);  $me->city = 'amsterdam';  $bff->city = 'amsterdam';  $me->bestfriend()->associate($bff); 

This is of course assuming your User model has a function that looks like...

public function bestfriend() {     return $this->hasOne('BestFriend'); }