I just wanted to make sure this was acceptable and that there were no pitfalls to this method of building Eloquent models.
I'm used to simple Eloquent::where('something', 'else') kinda calls. However with the database I have, I needed to join a couple of tables to properly get the model I need with the data I had accessible in the code. Is it okay to populate an eloquent collection while calling joins and more complex sql queries?
Here's some example code to demonstrate the point:
$items = Item::select('items.*')
->join('shops as sh', 'shops.id', '=', 'items.shop_id')
->where('sh.name', 'Cool Shop')
->get();
I'm aware of the has-any-through relationships too. But if the above is fine, I definitely would appreciate that kind of flexibility that can turn many SQL queries into an Eloquent model.
Thanks