one to many relationship help in laravel 4

Question

I am trying to create a relationship between Category and Product but somehow I couldn't use the category to connect into the product table and prints out the product names and instead I get the category's name

in my database

Table Name: products
Columns: id, name, price, category_id, description
Table Name: categories
Columns: id, name, description

in products table

id: 1
name: product1
price: 10
category_id: 1
description: p1
---------------
id: 2
name: product2
price: 10
category_id: 1
description: p2

in categories table

id: 1
name: category1
description: c1
---------------
id: 2
name: category2
description: c2

Product.php inside models folder

class Product extends Eloquent
{
    protected $product = 'products';
    public function category()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo('Category');
    }
}

Category.php inside models folder

class Category extends Eloquent
{
    protected $category = 'categories';
    public function product()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Product', 'category_id');
    }
}

ProfileController.php in controller folder

class ProfileController extends BaseController
{
    public function user($username)
    {
        $user = User::where('username', '=', $username);

        if ($user->count())
        {
        $user = $user->first();
        $title = 'User Profile';
        $category = Category::find(1);
        $products = Category::find(1)->name;
        return View::make('profile.user', compact('user', 'title', 'category', 'products'));
    }

    return 'User Not Found. Please Create an Account';
}

}

user.blade.php inside profile folder which is inside view folder

@extends('layouts.master')
@section('content')
    {{ Auth::user()->username }}
    <br>
    {{ Auth::user()->email }}
    <br>
    <h1>{{ 'Category name: '. $category->name }}</h1>
    <br>
    <h3>{{ 'Category Description: ', $category->description }}</h3>
    <br>
    {{ $products }}
@stop

at first where the {{$products}} I used a foreach loop

@foreach($products as $product)
    {{$product}}
@endforeach

but then I got this error

ErrorException
Invalid argument supplied for foreach() (View: J:\wamp\www\test\app\views\profile\user.blade.php)

so I tried var_dump($products) and realized $products gives out category1 which is the name of the category but what I want is printing the name of all the products which has category_id 1

Can someone give me a hand with this? Did I mess something up with the relationship or I did something stupid with the codes?

Answer 1

In your controller:

$category = Category::find(1);
$products = $category->product;

Then in your template you can use:

@foreach ($products as $product)
    {{ $product->name }}
@endforeach

Better yet you could use eager loading and forget about assigning products manually:

Controller:

$category = Category::with('product')->where('id', 1)->first();

Template:

@foreach ($category->product as $product)
    {{ $product->name }}
@endforeach

PS: Read more on eager loading here: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#eager-loading in order to prevent the dreaded N + 1 query problem!