Querying foreign table in model.

Have you looked into Eloquent relationships?

I'm not sure why you use accessors or mutators instead of an Eloquent relationships.

Can you so something like

Product.php

public function top()
{

    return $this->belongsTo(Color::class, 'top_color', 'id', 'top');
}

for all methods top(), side(), bottom().

In that way, given a $product, you can get the color's name of its top by doing

$topColor = $product->top->name;

and similarly for side's color and bottom's color as well.

Hope this helps.

Ok, perhaps I wasn't clear in my description of the problem. I know how relationships work and I'm using them.

What I wanted to accomplish is to have a model replace the top_color, side_color and bottom_color with their names from the colors table.

I can do this by setting up the relationship and then using the accessor to replace the values but I was hoping that perhaps there is some builtin solution.

setting up the relationship and using accessors is a builtin solution.

I wonder about the why, though - what are you trying to accomplish (in broader terms - like "I want to return a JSON object directly from the attributes" rather than "I want to build a query that returns this")

I guess you could do a Product::select() where you join the colors table once for each color attribute and use SQL aliases to get the color name into the attribute name - but there is still the "why" as to why that is a better solution than an accessor.

Thanks for the reply.

Sure, I can use select but the goal was to have it all done inside the model.

And yeah, accessors are not a bad way to do that, I was just curious if there's a more automagical laravel way of doing that, since it's so common to need that.

So I imagined something like:

class Product extends Model
{
  protected $follow_foreign = ["top_color" => "name", "bottom_color" => "name", "side_color" => "name"];
}

Anyway, accessors are good enough, thanks for the replies.