Games and Players (Users) for Table Tennis scores app (simple)

I'm not sure, but I think you have to set two hasMany relationships in the User model and naming the foreign keys explicitly. Like so:

function playerone() {
    return $this->hasMany('App\Games', 'foreign_key', 'local_key');
}


function playertwo() {
    return $this->hasMany('App\Games', 'foreign_key', 'local_key');
}

However, this won't group the results, but since they come from both datasets they should be easy to merge together (https://laravel.com/docs/master/collections#method-merge).

GroupBy is a method you can use on an Eloquent collection if I recall correctly (https://laravel.com/docs/5.1/collections#method-groupby)

@mstnorris considered using a pivot table? That way you can avoid the "player_one_id" and "player_one_score", and the player_two variations.

Example:

• games table has only id column for this purpose, and the timestamps
• users table has id and name columns
• game_user table has game_id, user_id and score columns.

This way, if you and I played a table tennis game, it would be stored in the games table with id of 1. In the users table there would be two entries - mstnorris and toniperic, with id's 1 and 2 respectively. In the game_user table there would be two entries - first entry would be your score for that game, that is:

• game_id = 1
• user_id = 1 (your id)
• score = 1

the second entry in the game_user table would be my score for the game, that is:

• game_id = 1
• user_id = 2 (mine id)
• score = 3

So, essentially, I beat you 3 to 1 in a table tennis game. :)

This should scale well and give you more flexibility, especially since you could fetch all the games that have been played each day, and then eager load the necessary details (such as players who have participated, scores etc).

This is the approach i took with a scoring app for basketball games. It works out well, and you can group the games by the day the are played on easily.

I created my own model for the game_player though rather than using a default pivot.

i would post my models but am away on vacation sorry!

@mstnorris for people coming from Google and other sources, would be great if you actually posted your solution as well so we have it all in one place.

Thanks everyone, I'm still working on it but will return here once I'm done :)

@toniperic how do I group by the date (day) the games were played?

@mstnorris select rows from games table, and group by played_at field (or whatever you name it).