Laravel eloquent - One to many relationships

Question

I have just got started with laravel v3 and am trying to wrap my head around eloquent\'s One-To-Many relationships by creating a blog, I have posts that have a many to one relat

Answer 1

I hope you will find these tips useful.

On the post model rename the categories function to category. A belongs_to relation is singular, so this post has one and only one category.

Relations also have a short hand, this shorthand syntax is useful because it is cleaner to use and the results are cached. Heres an example:

$category = Category::find(1);
foreach($category->posts as post) {
    echo $post->title;
}

Now an example of how to get all the posts with their related categories:

$posts = Post::all();
foreach($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->category->name;
}

Now one thing you will quickly notice when doing this second example is the number of queries increase for each post you have. This is called the N+1 effect. Example, if you have 5 posts, one query will be executed to get those posts. Then in the loop we are executing a query to get the category. This results in 6 total queries.

To solve this problem, use eager loading, which reduces those 6 queries in our example down to 2.

$posts = Post::with('category')->all();
foreach($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->category->name;
}

I hope that helps!