laravel - saving new model to database

Question

I'm trying to get to grips with the Laravel framework, and I'm a bit confused with the ORM system.

I have 3 database tables:

projects (projectID, projectName, etc...)

tags (tagID, tag)

project_tags (ID, projectID, tagID)

So for example there might be the following data in the db:

projects:

1 --- My Project

tags:

1 --- PHP

2 --- MySQL

3 --- Javascript

project_tags

1 --- 1 --- 1

1 --- 1 --- 2

I have managed to get the project_tags to come through on the Project mode, by doing this:

public function tags(){

    return $this->hasMany('ProjectTag', 'projectID');

}

But i'm confused as to how I can insert records when creating a new project.

This is how I'm creating the project:

        $project = new Project();
        $project->projectName = $_POST['name'];
        $project->projectShortName = str_replace(' ', '', strtolower($_POST['name']));
        $project->projectDesc = $_POST['content'];
        $project->projectImg = str_replace(' ', '', strtolower($_POST['name'])) . '.png';
        $project->projectAddedDate = date('Y-m-d H:i');
        $project->projectUrl = ($_POST['url'] != '') ? $_POST['url'] : null;

        // TAGS SHOULD GO HERE SOMEHOW
        $project->save();

I have the tagIDs in an array, I'm just not sure how I'm supposed to use them.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Many to many should be defined using belongsToMany , not hasMany

Try

public function tags(){

  return $this->belongsToMany('Tag', 'project_tags', 'projectID', 'tagID');

}

and

$user->tags()->attach($tags); where $tags is your array of IDs.

See http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#relationships for the docs on many to many