Laravel 4 finding collection based on relationship with 2 other models

Question

I have models like this:

1. have a table (product_types) of product types.
2. have a table (products) of products with a many-to-one relationships to the product types table.
3. have a table (attribute_types) of attribute types.
4. have a table of (many-to-many) relationships between product types and attribute types
5. have a table (attributes) containing attribute type, attribute value.
6. have a table of (many-to-many) relationships between products and attributes.

There are a few main things I need to do with this collection

$product_type = ProductType::find(1);

Find all the products for a product type.

return $product_type->products;

Find all the attribute types for a product type

return $product_type->attribute_types;

Find all the attributes for the attribute type and product type. I know the problem here is I need attributes to be the children of product type and attribute type.

But, I'm not sure the best way to do this.

Answer 1

Setup relations like in docs http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#relationships

Then you can get collection you want like this:

//return $product_type->products;
$product_type->load('products')->products; // returns Eloquent Collection of products
// or shorter equivalent:
$product_type->products;

//return $product_type->attribute_types;
the same as above since the relationships are identical (many-to-many)


// Then to get Attributes:
$product_type->load('products.attributes');
//then you can get all attributes as a single array (every attr as an array not model):
$attributesArray = $product_type->products->fetch('attributes')->collapse();

// or without casting merge all Attributes in a loop:
$attributesCollection = new \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection;
foreach ($product_type->products as $product)
{
  $attributesCollection = $attributesCollection->merge($product->attributes);
}