Laravel 4 hasMany does not work

Question

I have an Eloquent model named Auction and it has cars in a one-to-many relationship. This is the function for retrieving the cars:

public function cars()
{
    return $this->hasMany('Car');
}

The car model is created and in the car table very row has a auction_id value. However, the function does not seem to work, when I do

$auction = Auction::find('1');
var_dump($auction);

I get as output:

protected 'relations' => 
array (size=0)
  empty

Shouldn't there be something?

$auction->cars

also returns null by the way.

Answer 1

Relations are not loaded until called unless eager loading is used, so that's why relations comes up empty. As for cars being null, if you'd like to paste the rest of your model and the full output of var_dump($auction) that would likely be helpful for debugging (as an aside, it should be Auction::find(1), since the ID is an integer). We are also available for help in #laravel on freenode.