Alternatives to writing joins with foreign keys in eloquent? - php

Question

I'm using laravel-eloquent and want to return a collection that joins several tables. For now, I do this using the query builder join method, but I would like to stay within eloquent. I mean, I already defined all my relationships, why should I write joins with foreign keys all the time?
For example, if I have defined my models like this:
<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class User extends Model
{
public function comments()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\Comments');
}
}
<?php
namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Comment extends Model
{
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\User');
}
}
and want to return all the comments with the user names, for now I would write this:
DB::table('users')->select('users.name', 'comments.body')
->join('comments', 'users.id', '=', 'user_id')
->get();
I have tried writing
$users = new 'App\User';
$users->with('comments')
->select('name', 'comments.body');
but it didn't work. Do I need to define a new collection? I will end up with many, many collections if I do that...

Answer 1

Try:
$result = null;
$users = new 'App\User';
$records = $users->with('comments')->get();
if ($records->isNotEmpty()){
$result = $records->map(function($val,$key){
return ["name"=>$val->name, "comments" => $val->comments()->get(['body']);
})->values()->all();
}
dd($result);
I have not tested the codes yet. Please check and let me know if it works for you?