Will multiple calls to Eloquent dynamic property hit the database multiple times?

Question

http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/eloquent#dynamic-properties

class Phone extends Eloquent {

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

}

$phone = Phone::find(1);

Now, if I then do something like this:

echo $phone->user->email;
echo $phone->user->name;
echo $phone->user->nickname;

Will Eloquent make a database call for every time I use the ->user dynamic property? Or is this smart enough to cache the user on the first call?

Answer 1

In your example, the user attribute on the $phone object will be lazy loaded, but it will only be loaded once.

Keep in mind, as well, that once the object is loaded, it does not reflect any changes to the underlying table unless you manually reload the relationship using the load method.

The following code illustrates the example:

$phone = Phone::find(1);

// first use of user attribute triggers lazy load
echo $phone->user->email;

// get that user outta here.
User::destroy($phone->user->id);

// echoes the name just fine, even though the record doesn't exist anymore
echo $phone->user->name;

// manually reload the relationship
$phone->load('user');

// now will show null, since the user was deleted and the relationship was reloaded
var_export($phone->user);