Laravel 5.7 - accessor on a user model to get a collection's relationship based on a few factors

Question

I have Users that could be related to items by aa few factors and I want to create a getItemDatesAttribute accessor that gets all of a users relevant items and get those items' dates. There isn't a direct relationship between the user and the dates in this scenario. I can get the relevant items:

/**
 * Accessor to get a user's relevant item dates
 *
 * @return mixed
 */
public function getItemDatesAttribute()
{
    $itemDates = Item::where('assigned_user_id', $this->id)
                   ->orWhereIn('assigned_team_id', $this->teams->pluck('id'))
                   ->with('dates')
                   ->get();
    dd($itemDates); // All the bugs with their dates if they have them...

    $itemDates->filter(function ($item) {
        // Not sure how to return just the dates
    });
}

Then I'm not really sure how to return all of the dates for all relevant bugs. The Item model has the relationship on it:

public function dates()
{
    return $this->hasMany(ItemDate::class, 'item_id', 'id');
}

The end result should be a collection of dates that through the few above factors (and any others needed) would be related to a user. I know I can achieve this with some nested foreach's, but was wondering if there was a better laravel way:

$items = Item::all();

    foreach ($items as $item) {
        if ($item->isRelative && !empty($item->dates)) {
            foreach ($item->dates as $item) {
                $dates[] = $date;
            }
        }
    }
    return $dates;

The isRelative is an accessor on the Item that does the same thing as my where/whereIn was doing in the first query.

Answer 1

Ended up figuring this out quite cleanly:

$relativeItems = Item::relativeTo($this)->with('dates')->active()->get();
return $relativeItems->pluck('dates')->flatten();

The relativeTo() and active() methods are scopes on the Item model.

Answer 2

You can achieve this using a join and select something like this

Item::join('item_dates', 'item.id', '=', item_dates.item_id')
    ->where('assigned_user_id', $this->id)
     ->orWhereIn('assigned_team_id', $this->teams->pluck('id') )
    ->selectRaw('item.id, item_dates.*')
    ->get();

This does not use the relationship but does the same thing and will proform better with large amounts of data.