A One-To-Many relationship between an user and other users ?

I needed to create a relationship from one user to another for something similar.

i based it off of this:

http://alexsears.com/tutorial/user-friendships-laravel/

You don't really need an additional table or model for the functionality you describe.

Typically you would set up your users table to be self-referential.

To achieve that you need an additional column in your users table (sponsor_id), which holds the information, who its parent is.

Your User model would look like this:

public function parent()
{
    return $this->belongsTo('App\User', 'sponsor_id');
}

public function children()
{
    return $this->hasMany('App\User', 'sponsor_id');
}

As you can see a user can have many children (beneficiaries), but only one parent (sponsor).

Hope that helps!

@Exiax I don't understand how one user can have many sponsors using your example since you're only adding a single sponsor_id to the users table. How does a single user store many sponsors in the Users table using a single sponsor_id field?

Say a user with id of 1 has several sponsors with id's of 2, 4 and 10?

@Cronix A user can't have many sponsors using my example. A user only can have one sponsor, but a sponsor can have multiple beneficiaries .

That should reflect the use-case @starmatt was describing, unless i got something wrong:

So when a user registers, he has the possibility to be sponsored by another user

and

The relationship I am trying to create is as such: A User can have many UserSponsored (beneficiaries) and a UserSponsored can have one User.

If a user should be allowed to have many sponsors, additionally to a sponsor having multiple beneficiaries, then you would of course need to set up a many-to-many relationship.

@Exiax Yep, it was pretty simple in the end.

Thanks for everybody for your input!