Laravel one to many get data - php

Question

So I'm very bad with these relationships in Laravel and I cant get my one to many relationship to work. Lets say I have a friend system like this:
Table Users:
id | username | password
Table Friends:
id | person1(int) | person2(int)
person1 and person 2 are the ID's of a user in the table Users
Now I have these 2 models:
class Friend extends Eloquent {
protected $table = 'friends';
public function friend_relations(){
return $this->belongsTo('User');
}
}
and:
class User extends Eloquent {
protected $table = 'users';
}
Now what I am doing is, after logging in, I want to show friends on the home page with the ID of the person logging in. So to get this I'd have it run like this:
$friends = Friend::where('person1', $id)->get();
Now this will give me the ID's of both of the persons, now I want to get the username that belongs to that user without running unnecessary extra queries so I would use a one to many relationship. However I cant seem to get the query to instantly get the name of the friends of the user logged in.
I tried something like:
$friends = Friend::where('person1', $id)->friend_relations;
and:
$friends = Friend::all()->friend_relations()->where('person1',$id)->get();
gives me: Call to undefined method friend_relations()
but this will give me the error: Undefined property friend_relations.
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your relationships are a little off because you may be thinking about this one a little wrong.
Even though it may not look like it, this is a belongs to many relationship and your friends table is actually a pivot table relating your users table to itself.
To further simplify this, you should rename the columns in your friends table so it's more clear what is what. person1 and person2 are incredibly vague and will only serve to confuse. With that said, I'm going to assume the two columns are user_id and friend_id. If you wish to not do this, just assume when I say user_id, I mean person1 and friend_id would map to your person2.
With all that said, this becomes a fairly simple problem. Add the following to your User model.
public function friends()
{
return $this->belongsToMany(User::class, 'friends', 'user_id', 'friend_id');
}
Now in order to retrieve a user with their friends, you can do the following.
$user = User::with('friends')->find($id);
$friends = $user->friends; // This will return a collectino of friends.
Additionally, your Friend model becomes unnecessary so you can feel free to delete that.
Edit:
Now $friends is going to be a Collection (you can think of this as a sort of array) of User objects. There are going to be 0, 1 or many User objects inside the Collection so it doesn't make any sense to try to use $friends->date because it doesn't know which User's date within that collection to grab from.
You will need to loop through it to access each User's properties.
foreach($friends as $friend) {
echo 'Name: ' . $friend->name;
echo 'Date: ' . $friend->date;
}