Many to many relationship not syncing laravel 4.2 - php

Question

I have an object that has a one-to-many relationship with another object,
Client n:1 Project
A project client can have many users
Client n:n Users (pivot table of client_user)
And a project can have many users
Project n:n Users (Pivot table of project_user)
I have the project model in my code, I can run a sync on the projects users,
$project->viewers()->sync($syncArray)
After that I also want to sync the users to client, I am trying to do this, my doing,
$project->clients()->viewers()->sync($syncArray)
but it is complaining that it cannot find viewers, is there a ways to sync a relationship from a relationship or will I need to query the database to get that specific client first?

Answer 1

I'm not sure that you can chain relationships that easily. ->clients() returns as HasMany class and doesn't know about it's relationship to the users yet until you query them. Try grabbing the clients first and then looping over them to sync, e.g.:
foreach($project->clients as $client)
{
$client->viewers()->sync($syncArray);
}
// or
$project->clients->each(function($client) use ($syncArray)
{
$client->viewers()->sync($syncArray);
});
Edit: You could also try using a hasManyThrough relationship
class Project {
public function viewers()
{
return $this->hasManyThrough('App\User', 'App\Client');
}
}
$project->viewers()->sync($syncArray);