Laravel's pivot table + Pivot table in general

Question

What are laravel pivot tables and pivot tables in general? What is this all about?

Recently I made research about Pivot table. I thought I know them and What they are bu

Answer 1

When learning, focus only the pivot tables concept in Laravel (or eloquent). When I was learning I did not care about the general meaning of pivot table. I focused only on facts in the documentation (https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent-relationships#many-to-many)

many-to-many relationships require an additional table.And we can insert other useful data to this table as well. And can be used as a model in the system.

Example : User and Roles many-to-many relationship = User_roles

Because of Pivot tables, you can retrieve intermediate table data as a model (like other models in the system).

Example:

//get user by id
$user = App\User::find(1);

//get roles of this user
foreach ($user->roles as $role) {

  //pivot attribute returns a model which represent user_role table
  echo $role->pivot->created_at;

}

NOTE: you can create a class by extending pivot. But you have to implement the correct relationships to make it work. Your code should look somewhat similar to below code.

class Student extends Model
{
    /**
     * The users that belong to the role.
     */
    public function Rooms()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\Room')->using('App\Room_Student');
    }
}

class Room extends Model
{
    /**
     * The users that belong to the role.
     */
    public function Students()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('App\Student')->using('App\Room_Student');
    }
}

class Room_Student extends Pivot
{
    //
}

I hope this helps.