How To Get Article's Users and Comments With Eloquent - php

Question

There are three database tables users, articles and a joining table article_users_comments, which holds the comment, the user id commented the article and the commented article id.
I can achieve the following thing with pure SQL join, but I want to do it with Eloquent, I thought that it would be quite easy, but I am kind of confused right now.
I have been trying different things, but it still doesn't work.
// User
class User extends Authenticatable implements MustVerifyEmail,CanResetPassword{
public function comments()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\ArticleComments');
}
}
// Article
class Article extends Model{
public function getArticles(){
$articles = Article::paginate(3);
return $articles;
}
public function getSingleArticle($title){
$article = Article::where('title','=',$title)->get();
return $article;
}
public function articleComments()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\ArticleComments');
}
}
// ArticleComments
class ArticleComments extends Model{
protected $table = 'article_users_comments';
public $timestamps = false;
public function article()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\Article');
}
public function user()
{
$this->belongsTo('App\User');
}
}
// ArticleController(showing only the show method), which passes the data to the certain view
instantiating the Article Model
class ArticleController extends Controller{
/**
* Display the specified resource.
*
* #param int $id
* #return \Illuminate\Http\Response
*/
public function show($title)
{
$removeDashesFromUrl = str_replace('-',' ',$title);
$am = new Article();
$data = $am->getSingleArticle($removeDashesFromUrl);
return view('article',['article'=>$data]);
}
}
I want to get the comments and the users(which have commented the article) for a certain certain article.

Answer 1

You should set the foreign key in your articleComments and article relations:
Eloquent determines the default foreign key name by examining the name of the relationship method and suffixing the method name with _id. However, you may pass a custom key name as the second argument to the belongsTo method:
Article Model
public function articleComments()
{
return $this->hasMany('App\ArticleComments','commented_article_id');
}
ArticleComments Model
public function article()
{
return $this->belongsTo('App\Article','commented_article_id');
}
You can get the comments from a article using the relation:
$article = Article::find($id);
$article->articleComments; // This will return all comments for the given article
You could use a foreach loop and access each attribute from each comment:
foreach($article->articleComments as $comment)
{
echo $comment->id;
echo $comment->user->id;
echo $comment->user->username;
.
.
.
}
You can access the user and any of his attributes just calling the relation in your comment like i did above.
For more info: click here.
Note: i strongly recommend you changing your model name to Comment, we don't use model names in the plural, always in singular.