Undefined property in Laravel 5 - php

Question

I've looked at other questions that have answered this same error and I understand I have a property that cannot be defined but not sure how to make it defined. First time using Many-to-Many relationship so I'm assuming this is the issue.
Project Table
id
company
stage
status
date_started
date_finished
timestamps
Employee Table
id
name
department
timestamps
Employee_Project Table
id
employee_id
project_id
In both models, I have belongsToMany and for the show function in the ProjectController, I have:
$projects = Project::find($id);
In the view, I want to show company name ($projects->company) and the employees on that project with their respective departments. These do not work:
$projects->employees->name
$projects->employees->department
How do I access these properties?
--Update--
Jeff's answer works but I set up a table like
<thead><th>PM</th><th>AM</th></thead>
<tbody><td>#if($employee->department == 'Project Manager'){{ $employee->name }}</td>
<td>#else($employee->department == 'Account Manager'){{ $employee->name }}</td></tbody>#endif
and this does not work to show the correct employees in their respective sections. Any ideas how to fix this?

Answer 1

Your problem is that $project->employees is a collection, not an individual instance of an employee. You will need to iterate over the collection in order to access each individual employee's name:
foreach($project->employees as $employee) {
echo $employee->name;
echo $employee->department;
}
Update
It looks like you may need to restructure as below, I think you probably want the entire if construct to be within the same table cell, though I could be wrong:
<tbody>
#foreach($project->employees as $employee)
<tr>
<td>
#if($employee->department == 'Project Manager')
{{ $employee->name }}
#elseif($employee->department == 'Account Manager')
{{ $employee->department }}
#else
<!-- What about non project/account managers? -->
#endif
</td>
</tr>
#endforeach
</tbody>
I could be totally wrong, and maybe you want account managers and project managers in different columns:
<tr>
<td>
#if($employee->department == 'Project Manager')
{{ $employee->name }}
#endif
</td>
<td>
#if($employee->department == 'Account Manager')
{{ $employee->name }}
#endif
</td>
</tr>
Be sure to take a look at the documentation on Blade if statements.
Update 2
If you want to order how the related entities are coming back, you can do something like this (assuming you want the employees ordered by their department:
$project->employees()->orderBy('department', 'DESC')->get();
Notice you're no longer accessing the property, you're calling the relation method employees() so that you can modify the query prior to it being executed.
Here's a link to the documentation on ordering queries, and there is also another StackOverflow question on it.

Answer 2

So I figured out how to show the correct person to show up under their respective departments in the table and I wanted to share.
Thanks to #jeff-lambert I added the foreach loop but I had added to the entire row like in his first update. This did not work because the employees were not showing up in their respective departments. For example, account managers were showing up under the project manager . To resolve this, I had to add a foreach loop to each .
<td>
#foreach($projects->employees as $employee)
#if($employee->department == 'Project Manager')
{{ $employee->name }}
#endif
#endforeach
</td>
Hope this helps explain it.