Laravel Relationship - Additional fields in pivot table linking to additional models - php

Question

I have simplified the problem to get to the point. I have three tables, users, roles, account.
Normally I would set up the User model to have a many to many relationships with roles but I want those roles to be specific to each account. So I have added an additional field to the pivot table. Here are the tables and fields that I have;
‘users’ table
|—————————
| id | name |
|—————————
| 1 | Bob |
| 2 | Jim |
| 3 | Fred |
|—————————
‘roles’ table
|—————————
| id | title |
|—————————
| 1 | Administrator |
| 2 | Manager |
| 3 | Approver |
|—————————
‘accounts’ table
|—————————
| id | name |
|—————————
| 1 | ABC Company |
| 2 | XYZ Shipping |
| 3 | KLM Transport |
|—————————
I then have the pivot table role_user with an additional pivot field for the account;
|—————————
| role_id | user_id | account_id
|—————————
| 1 | 3 | 1
| 2 | 2 | 1
| 3 | 2 | 3
| 3 | 1 | 2
|—————————
I have used the withPivot function on the belongsToMany function when setting up the many to many relationships. This allows me to get the information using $user->roles->pivot->account_id but what I need is to be able to get the name of that company. All it’s passing to the blade template is the id from the pivot table and not linking that to an actual Account model.
Is there a way with Eloquent to get this entire model in the same way as the original relationship?

Answer 1

Create a Custom Pivot Model
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\Pivot;
class RoleUserAccountPivot extends Pivot
{
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo(User::class);
}
public function role()
{
return $this->belongsTo(Role::class);
}
public function account()
{
return $this->belongsTo(Account::class);
}
}
Update your belongsToMany relationships
Bellow is an example with the User::roles relationship
class User //extends...
{
public function roles()
{
return $this->belongsToMany(Role::class, /*other parameters*/)->using(RoleUserAccountPivot::class)->withPivot('account_id');
}
}
Usage
$user->roles->first()->pivot->account // returns Account model
Hope it helps.
Reference links:
Laravel doc on custom pivots