我如何在雄辩的ORM中为两个一对多关系的定义赋予相同的名称

Question

I am designing a toy project which is a twitter clone in Laravel-4 . I have following relationships in model below :

<?php

class Follower extends Eloquent {
    protected $guarded = array();

    public static $rules = array();

    public function user_follower()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('User','to_user_id');
    }

    public function user_following()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('User','from_user_id');
    }
}

A query for knowing following list of a user returns an Json object as below :

 [
{
    "id": 2,
    "from_user_id": 1,
    "to_user_id": 2,
    "created_at": "2013-12-15 17:40:26",
    "updated_at": "2013-12-15 17:40:26",
    "user_follower": {
        "id": 2,
        "full_name": "Shyanne Champlin",
        "username": "shyanne718",
        "created_at": "2013-12-15 14:28:53"
    }
},
{
    "id": 4,
    "from_user_id": 1,
    "to_user_id": 4,
    "created_at": "2013-12-15 17:40:26",
    "updated_at": "2013-12-15 17:40:26",
    "user_follower": {
        "id": 4,
        "full_name": "Vinnie Lang",
        "username": "vinnie398",
        "created_at": "2013-12-15 14:28:54"
    }
}
]

For other query for knowing followers for a user, in result "user_follower" gets changed to "user_following". So my question is how do I define same function name for both relations so It returns user 'value' with same 'key' name for both 'following users' and 'followers'.

Answer 1

I just tested your setup extensively, which seems to be working perfectly fine on my end.

I can think of 3 things:

1. Wrong definition of the with method. Should be: Follower::with(array('user_follower', 'user_following'))->get();

2. I never use underscores _ in my method naming. I assume Laravel is expecting userFollower() and userFollowing() , while still returning underscores in the JSON result.

3. A bug in your distro of Laravel. Just run composer update to be sure. I just ran it and it still works, so at least the current distro works fine. (I use "laravel/framework": "4.1.*", in composer.json)