Laravel hasOne through a pivot table

Question

So I have 2 models, User & Profile, the relationship is set up as follows:

    /**
     * User belongs to many Profile
     *
     * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\belongsToMany
     */
    public function profiles()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\Models\Profile', 'user_profiles');
    }

I have 3 tables, users, profiles & user_profiles (the pivot table)

I have a column in my users table called active_profile which gets populated with a profile id.

How can I set up the relationship so that I can call something like the following:

$user->active_profile

So that it will return all the profile information for the id set in active_profile?

Answer 1

On Laravel 5.8, since I wanted to use it with eager loading I used this package: https://github.com/staudenmeir/eloquent-has-many-deep

This was my scenario
A user can be tagged on many photo and a photo can have many users tagged on. I wanted to have a relationship to get the latest photo the user has been tagged on.

I think my scenario can also be applied to any many-to-many relationship

I did the pivot model UserPhoto

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot;

class UserPhoto extends Pivot
{

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

    public function photo()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Photo::class);
    }

}

And then on my User model using staudenmeir's package:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Staudenmeir\EloquentHasManyDeep\HasRelationships;

class User extends Model
{
    use HasRelationships;

    public function photos()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany(Photo::class);
    }

    public function latestPhoto()
    {
        return $this->hasOneDeep(Photo::class, [UserPhoto::class])
            ->latest();
    }
}

Then I can easily do something like this:

User::with('latestPhoto')->get() and $user->latestPhoto

---

Edit: In an another question, someone asked the same without using a package. I also provided an answer that will do the same result.

But after digging deeper, from both answers, you may avoid the n+1 query, you will still hydrate all the photos from your requested users. I don't think it's possible to avoid one or the other approach. The cache could be an answer though.

Answer 2

I could be wrong but why not just use a belongsTo relationship?

public function active_profile()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('App\Models\Profile', 'active_profile');
}

Hope this helps!