What is the correct query in my case with pivot table?

@Nakov thank you, will update

@Nakov I knew why this was familiar, you already told me once to fix that, I believe I forgot to commit this change: https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/eloquent/what-is-the-correct-query-to-check-if-a-list-of-items-is-not-empty

@Nakov Update: My mistake again.. With all the similar names I missed it. I actually do have these relationships: Both Items and Lists have belongsToMany via the pivot table.

Does it make it possible to get the necessary query using eloquent alone? Something like Lists::where('id', $list_id)->items()?

@cooperino Yes, even better:

Lists::with('items')->find($list_id);

@Nakov I was about to write the following (using your help from the old post):

Lists::with('items')->whereIn('id', [3])->get();, as you can see I'm still not too experienced and did unnecessary whereIn as if I was passing an array. Slowly learning, thank you!

@cooperino Just remember that ->get() will return a collection of lists in this case. So are there other lists with the same id ? I guess not.. so in such case you are looking for find(ID) method on the eloquent model. It will return single instance of the model, and ->with() is just to eager load the relation items.

Yep, I changed it and it looks good now

But now I'm having trouble with filtering to get few columns only from the items.

I tried: Lists::with('items')->find($list_id)->items->pluck($columns...);

But the find() does not return collection of models, it returns an all array:

=> Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1221
     all: [
      App\Models\Items{#1241

How can I make it similar to something like Items::all() to get collection of Items models? (confusion)

Update: I made some filtering using query inside with:

$items = Lists::with(['items' => function ($query) {
        $query->select('column1', 'column2');
    }])->find(3);