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Hi guys,
I'm stuck on how to implement the following scenario in Eloquent:
Imagine a site that has news and logged in users that has a page where all the news item that haven't been seen by the current user need to be displayed.
For this I have made 3 database tables:
users id#username#password etc.
news id#title#content
news_users id#news_id#user_id
In the News-model I've set the following relationship:
public function viewers()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'news_users', 'news_id', 'user_id');
}
Now the idea is that I add a record in news_users, whenever a user marks a news item as seen.
The question now is, how to retrieve all news items that haven't been seen by the current user.
Any suggestions?
In the Laravel documentation you can see that there is a method called has() where you can query for items that have at least one of their relation (i.e. $post->has('comments') only returns Posts that have comments).
Not documented though is the doesntHave() method, which can be found in the Laravel API docs at: http://laravel.com/api/5.1/Illuminate/Database/Eloquent/Builder.html#method_doesntHave
This should do what you need :)
Thanks @joshbrw! I indeed wasn't aware of the doesntHave method. But it does solve my issue.
In case other users might be with a similar issue, below the full Eloquent query to select all news messages that $userId hasn't seen yet:
$this->model->whereDoesntHave('viewers', function($q) use ($userId) {
$q->where('user_id', $userId);
})->get();
@mstnorris Yeah.. I knew I'd seen has() when browsing and thought I'd look at the API docs as I knew Laravel would have a nicely-named negative function. :)
@michiel Perfect, very nice!
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