laravel Eloquent join and Object-relationship mapping - php

Question

Ok so i'm kind of newish to eloquent and laravel (not frameworks tho) but i hit a wall here.
I need to perform some queries with conditions on different tables, so the eager load (::with()) is useless as it creates multiples queries.
Fine, let use the join. But in that case, it seems that Laravel/Eloquent just drops the concept of Object-relationship and just return a flat row.
By exemple:
if i set something like
$allInvoicesQuery = Invoice::join('contacts', 'contacts.id', '=', 'invoices.contact_id')->get();
and then looping such as
foreach ($allInvoicesQuery as $oneInvoice) {
... working with fields
}
There is no more concept of $oneInvoice->invoiceFieldName and $oneInvoice->contact->contactFieldName
I have to get the contacts fields directly by $oneInvoice->contactFieldName
On top of that the same named columns will be overwrited (such as id or created_at).
So my questions are:
Am i right assuming there is no solution to this and i must define manually the field in a select to avoid the same name overwritting like
Invoice::select('invoices.created_at as invoice.create, contacts.created_at as contact_create)
In case of multiple joins, it makes the all query building process long and complex. But mainly, it just ruins all the Model relationship work that a framework should brings no?
Is there any more Model relationship oriented solution to work with laravel or within the Eloquent ORM?

Answer 1

Instead of performing this join, you can use Eloquent's relationships in order to achieve this.
In your Invoice model it would be:
public function contact(){
return $this->belongsTo('\App\Contact');
}
And then of course inside of your Contact model:
public function invoices(){
return $this->hasMany('\App\Invoice');
}
If you want to make sure all queries always have these active, then you'd want the following in your models:
protected $with = ['Invoice']
protected $with = ['Contact'];
Finally, with our relationships well defined, we can do the following:
$invoices = Invoice::all();
And then you can do:
foreach($invoices as $invoice)[
$invoice->contact->name;
$invoice->contact->phone;
//etc
}
Which is what I believe you are looking for.
Furthermore, you can find all this and much more in The Eloquent ORM Guide on Laravel's site.

Answer 2

Maybe a bit old, but I've been in the same situation before.
At least in Laravel 5.2 (and up, presumably), the Eloquent relationships that you have defined should still exist. The objects that are returned should be Invoice objects in your case, you could check by dd($allInvoiceQuery); and see what the objects are in the collection. If they are Invoice objects (and you haven't done ->toArray() or something), you can treat them as such.
To force only having the properties in those objects that are related to the Invoice object you can select them with a wildcard: $allInvoicesQuery = Invoice::select('invoices.*')->join('contacts', 'contacts.id', '=', 'invoices.contact_id')->get();, assuming your corresponding table is called invoices.
Hope this helps.