Laravel Eloquent multiple method chaining

Question

I have a project with laravel that i have some tables like below:

#users table:
->id
->username
->password

#profile table:
->id
->user_id
->firstname
->lastname

#articles table:
->id
->user_id
->title
->body

#photos table:
->id
->article_id
->path

to getting user articles photo i'm wondering what should i do with eloquent i set the relationships in model but when i first just tried it i noticed i cant just do something like

User::find(1)->articles()->photos();

then i tried some other ways but i failed!
and now i want to know how can i retrieve the photos related to the user and its article?
thank you guys in advance.

Answer 1

You can use the with method to eager load the relationships. You can also use the dot notation to eager load "nested" relationships.

Example:

User::with('articles.photos')->find(1);

This will retrieve the user with a primary key of 1. It will also retrieve all of the user's articles and the photos related to those articles.

Docs on eager loading and the dot notation: http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent-relationships#eager-loading

Answer 2

You'll have to pluck the photos out of the articles collection:

$user = User::with('articles.photos')->find(1);

$photos = $user->articles->pluck('photos')->collapse();