Using eloquent relation - php

Question

I am trying to understand how to effectively use Eloquent relationships to have some high level functions in the model.
I have a subscription app with 2 tables, 'users' and 'subscriptions'.
This is a legacy system so I cannot just change things in any way I want.
Table users (model App\User)
id
email
active (0/1)
join_date
address etc
phone
Table subscriptions (model App\Subscription)
id
user_id
box_id (what the person is subscribed to get)
amount
Users are marked active or not active.
I would like to have a static method on the Subscription model that will give me all the active subscriptions. This data is then fed into other parts of the application.
This is derived by joining subscriptions to users and filtering based on the active column.
The query is like this:
SELECT users.*, subscriptions.*
FROM subscriptions
JOIN users ON users.id = subscriptions.user_id
WHERE users.active = 1
Subscription model
class Subscription extends Model
{
public static function allActive()
{
// This works except it doesn't use the eloquent relationship
return static::where('users.active', 1)
->join('users', 'users.id', '=', 'subscriptions.user_id')
->select('users.*','subscriptions.*')
->get();
}
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo(User::class);
}
}
User model
class User extends Authenticatable
{
use Notifiable;
public function subscriptions()
{
return $this->hasMany(Subscription::class);
}
}
I would use it like this:
$subscriptions = \App\Subscription::allActive()->toArray();
print_r($subscriptions);
I have 2 questions.
How do I rewrite the allActive function to use the relationship I already defined? Any solution should generate SQL with a JOIN.
In the returned data, how do I separate the columns from the two separate tables so that it is clear which table the data came from?

Answer 1

Given the relationships you have wired up, to get only active subscriptions from the model class you will have to do it this way:
class Subscription extends Model
{
public static function allActive()
{
$activeSubcriptions = Subscription::whereHas('user', function($query){
$query->where('active', 1) //or you could use true in place of 1
})->get();
return $activeSubcriptions;
}
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo(User::class);
}
}
Thats working with closures in Laravel, quite an efficient way of writing advanced eloquent queries.
In the callback function you will do pretty much anything with the $query object, its basically working on the User model since you mentioned it as the first parameter of the ->whereHas
Note that that variable has to have EXACTLY the same name used in declaring the relationship
The above i suppose answers your first question, however its highly recommended that you do most of this logic in a controller file
To answer question 2, when you execute that get() it will return Subscription objects array so to access the info based on columns you will have to go like:
$subscriptions = \App\Subscription::allActive();
foreach($subscriptions as $subscription){
$amount = $subscription->amount; //this you access directly since we working with the subscription object
$box_id = $subscription->box_id;
//when accessing user columns
$email = $subscription->user->email; //you will have to access it via the relationship you created
$address = $subscription->user->address;
}