Laravel Eloquent maximize efficiency but keep elegant structure - php

Question

Im working in a sensitive section of my app and i need to make sure to minimize the number of querys. I can easily do this with a multiple joins. The question is: is there a way to do this with beauty?
Elequent relationships are a good place to start but most of the time it requires multiple query.
The eager loading method used in this article looks alot better but still requires at least 2 querys and uses a whereIn statement instead of a join.
Article Example Of Eager Loading:
$users = User::with('posts')->get();
foreach($users as $user)
{
echo $user->posts->title;
}
Using Eager Loading, Laravel would actually be running the following
select * from users
select * from posts where user_id in (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...)
My current solution is to use laravel scopes in a way not intented.
public static function scopeUser($query) // join users table and user_ranks
{
return $query->join('users', 'users.id', '=', 'posts.user_id')
->join('user_ranks', 'users.rank_id', '=', 'user_ranks.id');
}
public static function scopeGroup($query,$group_id) // join feeds,group_feeds (pivot) and groups tables
{
return $query->join('feeds', 'feeds.id', '=', 'posts.feed_id')
->join('group_feed', 'feeds.id', '=', 'group_feed.feed_id')
->join('groups', 'groups.id', '=', 'group_feed.group_id')
->where("groups.id","=",$group_id);
}
The resulting query looks like this:
$posts = Post::take($limit)
->skip($offset)
->user() // scropeUser
->group($widget->group_id) // scropeGroup
->whereRaw('user_ranks.view_limit > users.widget_load_total')
->groupBy('users.id')
->orderBy('posts.widget_loads', 'ASC')
->select(
'posts.id AS p_id',
'posts.title AS p_title',
'posts.slug AS p_slug',
'posts.link AS p_link',
'posts.created_on AS p_create_on',
'posts.description AS p_description',
'posts.content AS p_content',
'users.id AS u_id',
'users.last_name AS u_last_name',
'users.first_name AS u_first_name',
'users.image AS u_image',
'users.slug AS u_slug',
'users.rank_id AS u_rank',
'user_ranks.name AS u_rank_name',
'user_ranks.view_limit AS u_view_limit'
)
->get();
Because of column name collisions i then need a huge select statement. This works and produces a single query, but its far from sexy!
Is there a better way to deal with big joined querys?

Answer 1

You could try to actually add the selects with aliases in the scope.
Note: This is totally untested
public static function scopeUser($query) // join users table and user_ranks
{
foreach(Schema::getColumnListing('users') as $column){
$query->addSelect('users.'.$related_column.' AS u_'.$column);
}
$query->addSelect('user_ranks.name AS u_rank_name')
->addSelect('user_ranks.view_limit AS u_view_limit');
$query->join('users', 'users.id', '=', 'posts.user_id')
->join('user_ranks', 'users.rank_id', '=', 'user_ranks.id');
return $query;
}
There is also no need to alias the post columns with a p_ prefix... But if you really want to, add another scope that does that and use addSelect()