Laravel 5.4 custom join (raw sql) mapped to an Eloquent Model

Question

Can somebody tell me how i can map the result of a Join made with RAW SQL or the Query Builder to an Eloquent Model ?

Teams has many Users who has Many Students who has many Projects

I'm doing a join to get all the projects of a team through the sub relations

Example :

$projects = Project::join('students', 'students.id', '=', 'projects.student_id')
            ->join('users', 'users.id', '=', 'students.user_id')
            ->join('teams', 'teams.id', '=', 'users.team_id')
            ->select('projects.*', 'students.*', 'users.*', 'teams.*')
            ->get();

Now, how can i get the result here to be mapped to a Collection of "Project" Model having the sub relations mapped their respective Model

• Student
• User
• Team

Answer 1

You don't need to use joins. Use Eloquent's eager loading instead.

Provided you have relations defined correctly in your models, the following should do the trick:

$projects = Project::with('student.user.team')->get();
foreach($projects as $project) {
    $student = $project->student; //Student model
    $user = $student->user;  // User model
    $team = $user->team;  // Team model
}

UPDATE: If you want to fetch projects for given team do the following:

$projects = Project::with('student.user.team')->whereHas('student.user.team', function($query) use ($teamId) {
  $query->whereId($teamId);
})->get();