How to join two Collections? (L5.4)

Hi, I'm building an appointments booking system, got a users table and an appointments table. Users can either be the appointment initiator (the one who creates the appointment) or the appointment recipient (the one who receives the appointment request).

I need to display a list of all appointments for a user, where they are either the initiator or the recipient, so I need to join the two separate collections I get, so I can pass that single list to the blade template to display. Using a standard one to many relationship, I have:

    // Get all of the user's appointments where they are an initiator: (one to many)
    public function appts_initiator()
        {
        return $this->hasMany('App\Appointment', 'initiator_id');
        }

    // Get all of the user's appointments where they are a recipient: (one to many)
    public function appts_recipient()
        {
        return $this->hasMany('App\Appointment', 'recipient_id');
        }

and controller code:

    public function listappointments()
        {
        // Get appt list for this user (initiator or recipient) from DB:
        $apptsinit = User::find(Auth::user()->id)->appts_initiator();
        $apptsrecpt =  User::find(Auth::user()->id)->appts_recipient();

        // NEED TO SOMEHOW JOIN/APPEND $apptsinit AND $apptsrecpt HERE TO FORM ONE COLLECTION:
        $all_appts_with_user    = ??? // Effectively $apptsinit + $apptsrecpt

        // Return view with appts (listed in blade template):
        return view('listappts', array('page' => 'listappts', $all_appts_with_user));
        }

How do I join the collections please, or is there a different way of achieving this?

Thanks. Alex

tomopongrac

8 years ago

Level 51

You have method merge()

https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/collections#method-merge

$all_appts_with_user = $apptsinit->merge($apptsrecpt);

ajck

8 years ago

Level 1

Thanks but that merges rather than appends https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/collections#method-merge "If a string key in the given items matches a string key in the original collection, the given items's value will overwrite the value in the original collection:"

topvillas

8 years ago

Level 46

Yeah, that's exactly what it should do. You can't have to keys that are the same in a dictionary.

ajck

8 years ago

Level 1

OK, fair enough, but how do I do what I originally stated - append a list of results (users) to another list of results, both of which are the same type, and even if there are duplicates in the results? Thanks

arukomp

8 years ago

Level 10

How about this?

        $apptsinit = User::find(Auth::user()->id)->appts_initiator;
        $apptsrecpt =  User::find(Auth::user()->id)->appts_recipient;

        $all_appts_with_user = $apptsinit->splice(
            $apptsinit->count(),
            null,
            $apptsrecpt
        );

        return view('listappts', array('page' => 'listappts', $all_appts_with_user));

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