Laravel Eloquent ORM: Select from two tables without using find() possible?

Question

Basically I would like to run a very simple database select query accross two tables in mysql considering a one-to-many-relationship.

categories : This table contains all product-categories. The primary key is "id" . It has one column "url" which holds the string how to access this category, eg "greeting-cards".

products : This table contains all products whereas each product has one category id. The primary key is "id". It has one column "category_id" which represents the id of the category the product corresponds to.

So, according to the documentation of Eloquent ORM, I did this:

$products = \App\Category::find($CATEGORY_ID)->products);

And it's is working like a charm.

Now the problem is: When accessing a webpage, the URL doesn't look like this:

www.domain.tld/categories/123

However, it looks like this due to SEO:

www.domain.tld/categories/greeting-cards

Therefore, I modified the database query like this:

$products = \App\Category::where('url', $category)->products);

But this does not work! Do I see it correctly that I have to use find() and placing a where() method is wrong here? Are there any other approaches to do this in Eloquent? I don't like to use a second database query to get the ID of the corresponding category url and then paste this id into the database query... I know this is possible, but I think there should be more elegant ways to this in Eloquent?

Thank you so much!

Answer 1

You have to retrieve the model in order to use its relations.

If you want to use where() just call first() :

Example:

\App\Category::where('url', $category)->first()->products

More methods are available at Laravel's docs: Retrieveing single models .