multiple one to one relationships laravel - php

Question

Okay so I'm building a pretty large application in Laravel. Users manage their own virtual soccer teams. I have a users table then I have a teams table with team specefic things like name, level,and arena, etc. For the arena though I decided to add a arenas table and then add a arena_id column in the teams table instead of just adding the arena name to the teams table.
so here is the basic relantionship:
User hasOne Team
Team hasOne User
Team hasOne Arena
Arena hasOne Team
so if I wanted to get the arena for a user I call the method
$user = User::with('team')->where('username', '=', $username)->first();
$user->team->arena->arena_name;
and everything works fine; however I feel there is a much cleaner or simpler way of doing this. Is there or is this fine for the aplication?

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with the way you are doing it. That is a perfectly good way of doing it for your needs. However something that might help is creating a getArenaFromUsername() method in the User model. Your User model would look something like this:
<?php
class User extends \Eloquent {
protected $fillable = [];
public function getArenaFromUsername($username)
{
$user = User::with('team')->where('username', '=', $username)->first();
return $user->team->arena->arena_name;
}
}
So then to get the arena name from a controller you just do:
$user = new User;
$arena = $user->getArenaFromUsername($username);
-----------------------------------------OR-----------------------------------------------
Or use dependency injection by doing the following in your controller using the same method we just created in the model:
protected $user;
public function __construct(User $user)
{
$this->user = $user;
}
then to use it you can use one line in any method in your controller like so:
$this->user->getArenaFromUsername($username);
These are all different ways of abstracting your query to make it more reusable and cleaner to call in your controller. Don't be afraid to make public methods in your model to call.

Answer 2

A couple things.
You can eager load the sub-relationship like so:
User::with('team', 'team.arena')...
You can also create an accessor function (http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#accessors-and-mutators) on your User model to make it a first-class property on the User object:
// accessed via $user->arena
public function getArenaAttribute {
return $this->team->arena;
}
// accessed via $user->arenaName
public function getArenaNameAttribute {
return $this->team->arena->arena_name;
}