Laravel - Using joins with where across two tables

Question

I have table, 'jobs', indexed by job_id, and and table discussions with foreign key 'job_id'.

In jobs I have a column called 'summary', and in discussions a column called 'body'. I want to search for the same text string in both of these columns across both these tables and return the applicable jobs.

Eg, if a jobs record with job_id=7 has the string 'somestring' in it's 'summary' column, and a discussions record has foreign key job_id=20 and has string 'somestring', I want the job records for job_id=7 and job_id=20 returned.

I am using laravel. I'm having trouble finding a solution, this is the closest I have got:

$query->join('discussions', function( $join ) use ( $search_term ){
                $join->on('jobs.job_id', '=', 'discussions.job_id');
                $join->where('discussions.body', 'LIKE', $search_term );                    
                $join->orWhere('jobs.summary', 'LIKE', $search_term );                                  
            })

But this just returns everything from my discussions table. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

There's SQL problem with that. What you are doing is basically this:

SELECT * FROM jobs INNER JOIN discussions ON (...) jobs.summary LIKE search_term

There is no WHERE clause, and that part (...) doesn't matter (simplified a bit) since there is OR , so in fact you don't (not only) join the table on the key/fk pair.

You simply need to move those where s out of the join closure and it will work as expected:

$query->join('discussions', function( $join ) {
     $join->on('jobs.job_id', '=', 'discussions.job_id');
})
    ->where('discussions.body', 'LIKE', $search_term )
    ->orWhere('jobs.summary', 'LIKE', $search_term )
    ->get();

Now your query will look like it should:

SELECT * FROM jobs INNER JOIN discussions ON jobs.id = discussions.job_id 
    WHERE discussions.body LIKE search_term
    OR jobs.summary LIKE search_term

Answer 2

Try this and see what comes out of it ;)

$query->join('discussions', function( $join ) use ( $search_term ){
                $join->on('jobs.job_id', '=', 'discussions.job_id')
                 ->where('discussions.body', 'LIKE', $search_term )                    
                 ->orWhere('jobs.summary', 'LIKE', $search_term );                               
            })
      ->select('*')
      ->get();

EDIT: I would replace the $query with the correct DB::table('mytable') .

DB::table('jobs')->join('discussions', function( $join ) use ( $search_term ){
                $join->on('jobs.job_id', '=', 'discussions.job_id')
                 ->where('discussions.body', 'LIKE', $search_term )                    
                 ->orWhere('jobs.summary', 'LIKE', $search_term );                               
            })
      ->select('*')
      ->get();

EDIT2: I missed a semicolumn, corrected