Laravel 4 Eloquent many-to-many condition parameter

Question

For a Laravel application I'm working on, I would like to do something like this with my Eloquent models:

$product = Product::with('terms')->find(1);

$brand = $product->terms('brand');
$color = $product->terms('color');

The terms is a many to many relationship. Terms in this context, is terms of taxonomies. So a products terms could be: Nike, Red, Boys, etc. And if I do $product->terms I get all terms, and when I do $product->terms('brand') I get 'Nike' for instance.

Right now my Product model is like this:

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

    public static $rules = array();

    public function terms($taxonomy)
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('Term', 'productterms');
    }

}

Is it even possible to do what I'm trying to achieve?

Answer 1

Why not just use a one-to-many relationship? Have a table of colours and a table of brands and then products can have belong to a colour and brand.

If you must have many-to-many (such that a product can have multiple brands or colours) then you can have a table for colours and brands again and then use joining tables for the relationship.

This is all described in the Laravel 4 documentation.