雄辩有多重关系

Question

I'm new to Laravel and ORMs in general, so this is probably a very basic concept that I'm missing. I have three tables that I'm trying to define a relation with using Laravel 4's Eloquent ORM. Here's the slimmed-down table definitions:

stores
id (PK)
name

postal_codes
id (PK)
postal_code
city
state
country

locations
id (PK)
store_id (FK => stores.id)
postal_code_id (FK => postal_codes.id)
*additional location-specific fields such as address, phone #, etc

The stores table has a one to many relationship with the locations table, so I can use $this->hasMany("Location") in the Stores model, and $this->belongsTo("Store") in the Location model.

My question is, how do I define the relation between locations and postal_codes in their respective models? The locations table has a many-to-one relationship with the postal_codes table. Ideally I want to be able to do something like this: $store->locations()->first()->city. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Aren't you looking for something like:

class Locations 
{
    public function city()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('PostalCode');
    }
}

So now you can call $store->locations()->first()->city. This will return a PostalCode model, if you want to return just the city:

public function getCity()
{
    return $this->city()->city;
}

And then you call $store->locations()->first()->getCity().

You could go further and create a __get() magic method so it calls everything dynamically.