Laravel: Whenever I return a model always return a relationship with it

Question

I have 2 tables:

User        |   Doctor
----------  |  ----------
id          |  id
email       |  user_id
name        |  signature
last_name   |  photo
password    |  description
date_birth  |

Every Doctor is related to a User, but every User may not be related to a Doctor. I did it this way because I didn't want to use Single Table Inheritance and end up with a bunch of NULL fields.

Is there a way to make, something like this?

// Instead of
$doctor = Doctor::with('User')->find(1);
$doctor->user->name;
// This
$doctor = Doctor::find(1);
$doctor->name;

P.S: Didn't know what to put in the title, what should I put instead so it is more relevant to the question?

Answer 1

You can specify default eager loaded relationships using the $with property on the model.

class Doctor extends Eloquent {

    protected $with = ['user'];

    // ...
}

(The property might need to be public, I forget. Laravel will yell at you if it does.)

You will still need to use $doctor->user->name, but the relationship will be automatically loaded without you needing to explicitly call it. If you really want to use the $doctor->name syntax, you could create Accessors for those column names, which would then fetch and pass the appropriate User relationship columns.

Answer 2

I ended up using Accessors and $appends and it worked as intended. It even appears in the docs Appends + Accessors (at the end). Thanks to Cyrode, whom showed me the Accessors (didn't know they exised).

I could've not use the $appends array, but you need it if you're returning the model in JSON.

As Jarek Tkaczyk deczo suggested, you should use with property when you go with this approach, otherwise whenever you load multiple Doctor models and call anything User related, you end up with a db query (per each Doctor instance) -> n+1 issue

Doctor class ended up looking like this:

<?php

class Doctor extends Eloquent {

    protected $table = 'doctors';

    protected $with = ['user'];

    protected $appends = ['first_name','last_name','email','date_of_birth'];

    protected $hidden = ['signature','user'];

    public function user(){

        return $this->belongsTo('User');

    }

    public function getFirstNameAttribute() {

        return $this->user->first_name;

    }

    public function getLastNameAttribute() {

        return $this->user->last_name;

    }

  public function getEmailAttribute() {

      return $this->user->email;

  }

}

I had to put user inside the $hidden array or it would show up whenever I retireved Doctor (Besides I only needed some things of User, not everything)