Laravel Eloquent query unexpected result - php

Question

I've found some query result really unexpected.
It's Laravel 5.2
We have following entity:
User with method:
public function roles() : BelongsToMany
{
return $this->belongsToMany(Role::class)->withPivot('timestamp');
}
Each User can have many roles, so we have also Role entity (but it doesn't matter much in my question) and pivot table user_role with timestamp field (and ids of course), because we hold information about time, when User achieved specific role.
I want to get all Users with theirs last assigned Role
When I create query (in User context in some repository):
$this->with(['roles' => function($query) {
$query->orderBy('timestamp', 'desc');
}])->all();
the result will contain Users with Roles entities inside itself ordered by timestamp - it's ok. But I want to retrieve only one last role inside each User entity not all ordered.
So...
$this->with(['roles' => function($query) {
$query->orderBy('timestamp', 'desc')->limit(1);
}])->all();
And then I retrieve Users but only User which achieved some Role for the very last time contains it! All the other Users have their roles field containing empty array.
Why ordering was performed on each Users relation separately, but when I added limit it behaved like a global limit for all.
It drives me crazy...
Thanks for advices.
EDIT
I've created lastRoles() method to get all Roles ordered desc. But all, retrieving one is impossible.
public function lastRoles() : BelongsToMany
{
return $this->BelongsToMany(Roles::class)->withPivot('timestamp')->latest('timestamp');
}
And for testing:
$users = (new User())->with('lastRoles')->get();
But now I must iterate over Users and invoke lastRoles() on each one:
foreach ($users as $user) {
var_dump($user->lastRoles()->get()->first()->name);
}
Then I retrieve names of latest Roles assigned to each User.
So... There is no way to do it in one query? This is the only way?

Answer 1

For this to work, you would need a helper function:
public function latestRole()
{
return $this->hasOne(Role::class)->withPivot('timestamp')->orderBy('timestamp', 'DESC');
}
And then:
$this->with('latestRole')->get();
Credits to this awesome article.

Answer 2

When you eager load a relationship with query constraint(s), the query will be run once to load all relationships, not each one individually. This is the expected behavior. Think about it, eager loading exists to turn many queries into one query in order to optimize performance. There is only one query executed, so your limit constraint will limit the entire result set, rather than on a per model basis.
To circumvent this, you could try creating another belongsToMany method that adds the desired limit constraint. The following code is untested:
public function lastRole() : BelongstoMany
{
return $this->belongsToMany(Role::class)
->withPivot('timestamp')
->orderBy('timestamp', 'desc')
->limit(1);
}
Assuming this works, you can then simply change the relationship method from roles to lastRole and remove your query constraint:
$this->with('lastRole')->all();