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maparfitt's avatar

Associate a role with a model

I'm trying to figure out the best way to associate a role with a second model in addition to User. That is, I have an "organizer" role that I want to associate with an "Event" model, and a "manager" role that I want to associate with a "Group" model. I'm using Spatie's permissions package; "organizer" and "manager" are both user roles that carry various permissions. But what's the best way to associate these roles with another model? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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4 replies
tykus's avatar

Not sure what you mean by associating a Role with an Event; are you saying Event has an Organizer or Event is an Organizer?

maparfitt's avatar

I mean "Event has an organizer." But organizer is a user role. I have an Event model (this is "event" in the sense of a real-world event, of course, not an event in the code).

tykus's avatar
tykus
Best Answer
Level 104

@maparfitt in that case you most likely need an organizer_id column, and an organizer relationship on the Event Model:

public function organizer()
{
	return $this->belongsTo(User::class);
}

The foreign key is pointing to a User; not the Role. It will be up to your business logic to associate a User with the appropriate Role.

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maparfitt's avatar

@tykus Thanks! I did have a foreignId column named "organizer" on the events table, and was trying to do some fancy stuff in my Event model to get Laravel to recognize it as referencing the user_id, but it wasn't working. So I changed the column to "organizer_id", as you suggested and also specified that column in the relationship in the Event model. That finally worked. So there's no specific connection to the role, but I guess this must be the best way to address the problem. Thanks a lot for your help.

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