Best way to connect two models

My preferences is always relationships. Your case too.

You can easily implement pivot table based relationship here.

Ref: https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent-relationships#defining-relationships

Thank you for that. I was using that page to build relationships for other models, and completely missed the section about the pivot attribute. I believe that is what I would need, correct?

Basically using the employees_organizations as the pivot for displaying the results? That's extremely helpful, and I thank you for your quick response.

Pivot is working as an intermediate table. For your issue, I believe Pivot is one of the best solution.

Read: http://laraveldaily.com/pivot-tables-and-many-to-many-relationships/

Thanks for the article! I was able to get most of my code completed today using that and the Laravel documentation.

Another question I had, is it possible to extend it one level deeper, and look up an intermediate table based on three models? Employees can be assigned to multiple organizations, and each employee can be in a different department in each organization, so there's potential that you would need to lookup the employees department for a specific organization.

The intermediate table itself would look like this:

department_employee_organization- employee_id, department_id, organization_id

but I am not sure how to have laravel make that relationship, as it appears that in the documentation it's looking for model1_model2 tables when using pivots.

@jfurnas

Well, you can think of it in different way. For instance-

A employee is belongs to a department and a department is belongs to an organization.

In vise versa, a department has many employee and an organization has many department.

Now your database table should be like this-

employees
- id
- organization_id
- department_id
- some other column
- more column

department
- id
- organization_id
- some other column
- more column

organization
- id
- some other column
- more column

Now you can apply One to Many relationships here.

After doing relationships successfully, you suppose to access data like this way-

//fetch a employee's department and organization 
$employee = Employee::with('department', 'organization')->where('id', 1)->first();

//fetch all employee's and organization of a deparment
$department = Department::with('employee', 'organization')->get();


//fetch all the department and employees of an organization 
$organization = Organization::with('department', 'department.employee')->get();


//here department.employee means that you are accessing department's relationships from organization, that's why . notation for Nested relationship.

Ref: https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent-relationships#eager-loading

@tisuchi doing it that way doesnt work, because it breaks the one employee to many oranizations and one employee to many deparments principal. In your example, I would need to have multiple entries for each employee, one for each department/organization combo.

There needs to be a table that connects employee to organization, which is connected to department.

In a real-world example, let's look at it like this:

Employee Name: John Doe Employee organizations: Organization 1, Organization 2

Departments: Organization 1 - Human Resources, Organization 2 - Catering

I see.

For you than, Many To Many is the best choose via intermediate table.

Applying pivot table, isn't that solve your issue?

Pivot table only seems to work with two models. In this case I have three. I suppose I could write a custom method like this

Public function department( $employee, $organization) { return Db::('department_employee_organization')->Where('employee_id','=','$employee->Id)->where('organization_id','=',$organization->id); }

Hmm, I was finally able to get it. I ended up connecting them together using a function similar to the one above. It's probably not the conventional or correct way to do it, but it works so I'm going to run with it!

Thanks for your help!