Understanding Laravel reationships - they don't make sense...? - php

Question

I have two tables. This one is called teams:
+------------+--------------+------+----------------------+----------+
| Column | Type | Null | Default | Comments |
+------------+--------------+------+----------------------+----------+
| id | int(10) | No | | |
| apikey | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| name | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| logo | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| url | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| hashtag | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| created_at | timestamp | No | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
| updated_at | timestamp | No | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
+------------+--------------+------+----------------------+----------+
The other one is called streamers:
+--------------+--------------+------+----------------------+----------+
| Column | Type | Null | Default | Comments |
+--------------+--------------+------+----------------------+----------+
| id | int(10) | No | | |
| apikey | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| name | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| team | int(11) | Yes | NULL | |
| type | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| twitch | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| mlg | int(11) | Yes | NULL | |
| url | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| twitter | varchar(255) | Yes | NULL | |
| status | int(11) | Yes | NULL | |
| viewers | int(11) | Yes | NULL | |
| created_at | timestamp | No | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
| updated_at | timestamp | No | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
| last_live | timestamp | No | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | |
| last_edit_by | int(11) | Yes | NULL | |
+--------------+--------------+------+----------------------+----------+
As you can see, the streamers table has a team field which is only the team ID.
My Team.php model already has this:
public function streamers()
{
return $this->hasMany('Streamer', 'team');
}
Here's what I want to do
I want to search the streamers by team, HOWEVER the end user should only have to use the name not the ID. How do I make the table relationship so that I can query the streamers table for the team name instead of the ID? Is this possible at all?
I would've assumed this is exactly what relationship hasOne is for, but apparently I was wrong. Since I obviously don't have the streamer ID's in the team table because every streamer ID on a team would be awful. Laravel relationships seems kinda wrong here... Because hasOne would fit on streamers but it only works with teams, but essentially the streamers have a team and the team belongs to many streamers and that would mean belongsToMany would make sense.
Thanks

Answer 1

What you're looking for is the belongsTo relationship.
In streamers include:
public function team()
{
$this->belongsTo('Team','team');
}
You can then query streamers by team like so:
$streamer = Streamer::whereHas('team', function($q)
{
$q->where('name', 'like', $teamName);
})->get();
More details can be found in the docs: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#querying-relations