Is there a way to use Eloquent to query a pivot table without having a model for that pivot table?
Situation: a user can own multiple businesses, and a business can be owned by multiple users. I have the following tables to deal with the many-to-many relationship.
| users | businesses | business_user |
-------------------------------------------
| id | id | business_id |
| name | name | user_id |
| created_at| created_at | created_at |
| updated_at| updated_at | updated_at |
My User.php model
public function businesses()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\Business')->withTimestamps();
}
My Business.php model
public function users()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\User')->withTimestamps();
}
1- In my controller, i'm trying to query the business_user (pivot) table to count the number of businesses the Auth user Id has.
select count(*) from business_user where user_id = Auth::user()->id() ;
2- I'm trying to query the business_user (pivot) table to get the business name for each row found in table business_user for that user id.
select business_user.business_id, businesses.name
from business_user
join businesses
on business_user.business_id = businesses.id
where business_user.user_id = Auth::user()->id() ;
I would like to query the pivot table with Eloquent, but I can't get the syntax right. Do I need a model for that business_user table?
Do some of you prefer not using Eloquent at all?
Thanks cv