Joining two tables Laravel

Question

I would like to have some feedback on how to join two tables using Laravel. I have read the documentation but still I am a little bit confused. And I'm still thinking on how to handle the problem. See... I have two tables one for the kids information and the other for the vaccines, I decided to put it apart because there are a lot of vaccines and I don't want the user to input every vaccine each time they add a new kid to the system. I am planning on making some type of checkboxes for the administrator to select the vaccines each kid has, but then I have the date, so I don't know what will be the best approach. And one of my questions is, how will I retrieve the data from the vaccines table when the user is filling out the kids information? Or do you guys have a better sugestion? I already have the table of the kids up and running, but now I have to add the vaccines. I would glady appreaciate your help. I will also leave a picture of the two tables.

Answer 1

To my understanding you will need to keep another table that would manage the interaction between kids and vaccines lets say kids_vaccines .

This means that, every kid that receive one or many vaccines would have their record added with timestamp of the time the vaccine(s) was received

An example would be:

Having KidsVaccine model with relationship with Kid and Vaccine like

public function kid()
{
    return $this->belongsTo(Kid::class, 'idkid');
}

public function vaccine()
{
    return $this->belongsTo(Vaccine::class, 'idvaccine');
}

And both your Kid model and Vaccine model can bear a hasMany() relationship with KidsVaccine

This means that, in lets say kids_vaccines table you would be managing idkid and idvacccine as both foreign keys (ofcourse your timestamps are here, so as to know when a vaccine was applied to a kid).

This results that you can easily create a kids with vaccines retrievable from the vaccines table.

If there is anything unclear you can point it.

Hope this helps :)