Multiple relations in RedBean

Question

I'm building a messaging system using ReadBean 3.5.1 (with MySQL). Each user can have multiple messages, so this is a simple one-to-many relationship for RedBean, like so:

$sender = R::load('user', 1);
$message = R::dispense('message');

$message->stuff = "Hello world";

$sender->ownMessage[] = $message;

What I want to do now is associate the recipient user with the message using a RedBean abstraction. I can get the ID of the recipient and store it in a column in the messages table manually, but is there a way I can do this with RedBean instead?

Answer 1

The solution to this is actually a bit backwards to what was posted. You need to create a message and assign two user models to it instead of the other way round. Here's an example:

// Make some models
list($sender, $recipient) = R::dispense('user', 2);
$message = R::dispense('message');

// Set some data
$sender->name = 'Sender';
$recipient->name = 'Recipient';
$message->title = "Hello world";

// Associate users and message
$message->sender = $sender;
$message->recipient = $recipient;

// Store everything
R::store($message);

Really easy. RedBean takes care of storing the updated user info when R::store($message) is called. The messages table then looks like this:

+----+-------------+-----------+--------------+
| id | title       | sender_id | recipient_id |
+----+-------------+-----------+--------------+
|  6 | Hello world |         3 |            4 |
+----+-------------+-----------+--------------+