Why Don't My Queried ID and Returned ID match?

Question

I'm working on developing an application for my company, and I've been using Laravel. I needed a self-referencing BelongsToMany relationship on my user model to allow users to belong to other users. (ie AEs - Clients)

Here is my code:

$id = 6;
var_dump( "ID Queried Is: $id.", Sentry::getUser()->clients()->find($id)->toArray() );

The result of Sentry::getUser()->clients()->find($id) causes problems because when I use relationships, it uses the wrong ID to search through the related table.

I can use Sentry::getUser()->clients->find($id) and it returns a User with the ID specified, but I can't eager load any relations to that model (that I'm aware of).

Does a BelongsToMany relationship (eg Sentry::getUser()->clients() ) query the result set by the Primary Key on the pivot table rather than by the named key ( client_id ), and if so, how can I get around it?

Answer 1

The result of this Sentry::getUser()->clients()->find($id) is, as you can see, pretty much correct. By that I mean it fetches correct user, however it select * so id (and possibly other common fields) is overriden, so the result has

$client->id; // id of the pivot table

while other fields are right.

So you can either query the relation like this:

$client = Sentry::getUser()->clients()->select('users.*')->find($id);

or lazy load the relation (if you really need this) and use Collection find() method:

$user = Sentry::getUser()->load('clients');
$client = $user->clients->find($id);

// or one line, not recommended:
$client = Sentry::getUser()->load('clients')->clients->find($id);

Otherwise just use what you tried:

$client = Sentry::getUser()->clients->find($id);

Answer 2

You could try with this but I don't know if it will work for you and if it's what you want to achieve:

$users = Sentry::getUser()->with(array('clients' => function($q) use($id)
{
    $q->whereId($id);

}))->get()->toArray();