Simple way to check if user is a friend in Laravel 4 - php

Question

I'm trying to easily check if a given user_id is a friend of the current user so I can simply do a check within a blade #if statement. My friendship functionality is two-way, and accepting a friendship is not required.
I have seem to have some setup going, but am not confident that I'm doing it properly.
Friendship Table
Schema::create('friendshipLinks', function ($table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->integer('userId_1'); // foreign key
$table->integer('userId_2'); // foreign key
$table->timestamps();
$table->foreign('userId_1')->references('id')->on('users')->onDelete('cascade');
$table->foreign('userId_2')->references('id')->on('users')->onDelete('cascade');
});
User Model (Trimmed)
class User extends Eloquent implements UserInterface, RemindableInterface {
use EloquentTrait, UserTrait, RemindableTrait;
protected $table = 'users';
// RELATIONSHIPS
public function posts() {
return $this->hasMany('Post');
}
// FRIENDSHIP
function friends() {
return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'friendshipLinks', 'userId_1', 'userId_2');
}
function friendsWith() {
return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'friendshipLinks', 'userId_2', 'userId_1');
}
}
Friendship Model
class Friendship extends Eloquent {
protected $table = 'friendshipLinks';
protected $fillable = ['userId_1', 'userId_2'];
}
At the moment I can get an array of all the users friends with (Two-way)
$friends = User::find($id)->friends;
$friendsWith = User::find(Auth::user()->id)->friendsWith;
$result = $friends->merge($friendsWith);
How can I easily implement something that will allow me to call a function that return a boolean like:
$isFriend = User::find($id)->isFriend($friend_id);

Answer 1

Here is the solution method in user model's class:
public function isFriend($friendId) {
return (boolean) $this->friends()->where('users.id', $friendId)->count();
}