laravel 4 Cannot Retrieve ALL results ? pivot table Many to Many - php

Question

I am a bit stuck on this...
I have 3 tables: photographers, languages and languages_spoken (intermediate table).
I am trying to retrieve all the languages spoken by a photographer. I defined my models like this:
class Photographer extends Eloquent {
/**
* Defining the many to many relationship with language spoken
*
*/
public function languages() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Language', 'languages_spoken', 'language_id', 'photographer_id');
}
class Language extends Eloquent {
/**
* Defining the many to many relationship with language spoken
*
*/
public function photographers() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Photographer', 'languages_spoken', 'language_id', 'photographer_id')
->withPivot('speakslanguages');
}
This is how I was trying to retrieve all the results for the logged in photographer:
$photographer = Photographer::where('user_id', '=', $user->id);
if ($photographer->count()) {
$photographer = $photographer->first();
// TEST
$spokenlang = $photographer->languages;
die($spokenlang);
// END TEST
} else {
return App::abort(404);
}
The problem is that in my db I have 4 entries for the same photographer. but when I do this I only get the last result...
[{"id":"3","language_name":"Afrikaans","updated_at":"-0001-11-30 00:00:00","created_at":"-0001-11-30 00:00:00","native_name":"Afrikaans","ISO639_1":"af","pivot":{"language_id":"3","photographer_id":"3"}}]
Any idea on what is wrong ?
Thanks a lot for your help!!!

Answer 1

The third parameter to belongsToMany should be the foreign key.
In the Photographer class:
public function languages() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Language', 'languages_spoken', 'language_id', 'photographer_id');
}
...should be:
public function languages() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Language', 'languages_spoken', 'photographer_id');
}
In the Language class:
public function photographers() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Photographer', 'languages_spoken', 'language_id', 'photographer_id')
->withPivot('speakslanguages');
}
Should be:
public function photographers() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Photographer', 'languages_spoken', 'language_id')
->withPivot('column1', 'column2', 'column3'); // withPivot() takes a list of columns from the pivot table, in this case languages_spoken
}
But, since you're not even using strange keys, you don't need to pass that third parameter at all.
So this is just fine:
public function languages() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Language', 'languages_spoken');
}
And:
public function photographers() {
return $this->belongsToMany('Photographer', 'languages_spoken')
->withPivot('column1', 'column2', 'column3'); // withPivot() takes a list of columns from the pivot table, in this case languages_spoken
}