One-to-many relationship without actual foreign key

Question

I want to make a one-to-many relationship like in the tutorial.

~~~ One To Many

An example of a one-to-many relation is a blog post that "has many" comments. We can model this relation like so:

class Post extends Eloquent {

    public function comments()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Comment');
    }

}

~~~

So i want to make a Model Post (connected to table "posts") and a Model Comment (connected to table 'comments'). I am creating the tables in phpMyAdmin and not with migrations (because i have no SSH support on the online server). The comments table has a column 'posts_id'.

Can i use ...

$comments = Post::find(1)->comments;

..without defining a foreign key relationship between the two tables in phpmyadmin?

And if the answer is YES.

Should i make a column name "post_id" or something like this in my 'comments' table or something for this to work? Just like you would do with a normal foreign key?

Answer 1

You don't have to explicitly declare a foreign key in the MySQL side but you have at least to create a post_id column that will be used by Laravel as a foreign key.

Of course, you can name this column as you want and specify it in the declaration of the relation :

class Post extends Eloquent {

    public function comments()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Comment', 'post_primary_key');
    }

}

You can also declare this column as a foreign key in PHPMyAdmin to improve robustness of your database but that's not Laravel business.