How to get just one table via Laravel Eloquent - php

Question

There are three tables in my system:
Students
Articles
categories
A student can write many articles and an article belongs to just one student. And an article can have only one category.
Article Model
class Articles extends Model
{
protected $fillable = ['id','title', 'body', 'students_id', 'created_at', 'updated_at'];
protected $table = 'articles';
public function students(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Students');
}
public function categories(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Categories');
}
}
I have created the above code, because I needed to get an articles list with who written by that article with the category name.
For that I used $article_list = Articles::get(); in the controller, and it works perfectly.
Then again I needed to get article list (this time I don't need the student name and category names; the output of the article table is more than enough).
But if I use $article_list = Articles::get(); it outputs the article table joining with the category and students table also.
Is there a way to get just the article table using Eloquent?

Answer 1

Relations within Eloquent are eager loaded so you are safe and it's no harm that categories are also being loaded. Quoted from the docs:
When accessing Eloquent relationships as properties, the relationship
data is "lazy loaded". This means the relationship data is not
actually loaded until you first access the property.
https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/eloquent-relationships#eager-loading

Answer 2

try :
class Articles extends Model
{
protected $fillable = ['id','title', 'body', 'students_id', 'created_at', 'updated_at'];
protected $table = 'articles';
public function students(){
return $this->belongsTo('App\Students');
}
public function categories(){
return $this->hasOne('App\Categories');
}
}
class Student extends Model
{
public function articles(){
return $this->hasMany('App\Articles');
}
}
you can try Has Many Through relationship type
official link: read more

Answer 3

#jjj's answer is the right one, but to explain in a bit more detail:
$articles = Articles::get();
will load the only articles. You can check it like this in your controller:
public function articles() {
$articles = Articles::get();
return $articles;
}
But $articles is a collection of models, and each model is "aware" of it's relationships. So if you try to access one of those relationships, Laravel will silently load it for you. So if you pass the same $articles above to your view (currently without categories), and then in your view do something like:
#foreach ($articles as $article)
{{ $article->categories->name }}
#endforeach
it will work, because Laravel is doing the SQL to find each article's category and then name. As #jjj explains, this is called Lazy loading and is described in the docs.
Incidentally lazy loading like this is usually inefficient, and it would be better to eager load, like you show in one of your comments above. It is described well in the docs.