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handisb's avatar

Implementing Relationships Between User Roles

I want to assign roles to users. I also want to have different roles have relationships with each other. For example, I have a "student" role, a "parent" role and a "teacher" role. A parent should have many students and a teacher should have many parents. In addition, a user can have multiple roles at once. How would I go about implementing these relationships within Laravel?

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7 replies
handisb's avatar

@automica Thank you for the suggestion! My main issue is setting up the relationships between the roles. I can't figure out how I would set up my tables and models to allow for (a) users to have multiple roles and (b) for different roles to be able to have relationships with each other.

automica's avatar

your roles appear to be all user to user with an additional pivot value to determine the type

So

User

public function parents(){
	return $this->belongsToMany(User:class, 'user_user', 'user_id', 'related_user_id')->wherePivot('type', 'parent');
}

public function students(){
	return $this->belongsToMany(User:class, 'user_user', 'user_id', 'related_user_id')->wherePivot('type', 'student');
}

public function teachers(){
	return $this->belongsToMany(User:class, 'user_user', 'user_id', 'related_user_id')->wherePivot('type', 'teacher');
}

and by assigning a user with an additional type value you can set whether they are related teachers, parents or students.

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handisb's avatar

@automica Hi! That's a very interesting solution. I was thinking of approaching it by having a users table and a roles table and using a pivot table to create a many-to-many relationship between them. How do you think I would approach it then?

jlrdw's avatar

I was thinking of approaching it by having a users table and a roles table and using a pivot table to create a many-to-many relationship between them.

That is how @jeffreyway teaches it in the videos and code is available on Github.

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